Food Safety Transgressions
July 4, 2010 | Filed under Asian-ness, Food
I attended a food safety for supervisors course yesterday at the request of my organisation. As I regularly run events for them and supervise fellow staff in circulating with food platters, they thought it would be appropriate to pay for me to attend what could be categorised as a “professional development workshop”. It was about as basic and based on common sense as it could be – wash your hands before preparing food, clean regularly, don’t use the same chopping board for raw and cooked food etc.
The most amusing part of the day came right at the start when the facilitator ran through a few real life examples of food-related organisations who had been caught blatantly breaching basic food safety regulations:
- A bakery with a cockroach baked into a sandwich loaf
- A dead rat found in the storage area of a restaurant
- A restaurant keeping live crabs in the restroom
All the above transgressions occurred in Asian-run establishments. It makes sense – when you’re an immigrant running a restaurant in Australia, what do you know of food safety when you speak little English and when there would have been no such regulations your home country? To reduce the likelihood of such incidents occurring, it makes sense to me for local governments to provide training workshops on food safety conducted in languages other than English. At the very least, it would make sense for literature on the topic to be made available in multiple languages – that way, even if people don’t get the benefit of hands-on training, they still have access to the basic principles in a language they can understand fluently.
3 Responses to Food Safety Transgressions
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Yes, basically. This road laws book I have on my desk suggests that I can read the road laws in pretty much any language I want, and I’m sure my voter enrolment form had contact numbers in a bunch of different languages, if I needed help in another language. This kind of stuff strikes me as totally common sense. Rather than whining that immigrants need to learn English to cope in Australian society, the general push should be to provide enough information for people to cope, in as many languages as possible. I hate this language elitism that means people consider things “English only” :\
Jessica on July 4, 2010 #
Eeek those examples remind me of some of the atrocities that restaurants here got caught doing when the council was cracking down on food and hygiene regulations – and they were all asian-run businesses too. The thing is though… I don’t get it, SURELY (this being a local restaurant that got smeared all over the news a couple of years ago) “doing the dishes” in a yum cha restaurant by means of hosing them – whilst still stacked – with the fire hose out the back is improper even in asia?!
Btw – cos i’m lazy and don’t want to click *comment* on 3 diff posts:
# How long until you finish your Masters? I think the conclusion/plan you’ve come to is the most sensible. Heck, reading it makes me fear graduating though.
& Yes you are a crazy wingman. Crazy, crazy, crazy.
Reply: I graduate at the end of next year…so 18 months to go!
Amanda on July 5, 2010 #
Eww oh wow. Baked into the bread? Nuts. I’ve worked in food service before, and you should see the stores when Health Inspectors are on the way. It’s crazy!
Veronica on July 6, 2010 #