[Sca-cooks] I'm back

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach <kingstaste at mindspring.com>:

>I would get trained and certified in Serve Safe, has anyone gone through that
>training?

I have not. I'm certified by New York City's Departments of Health 
and Sanitation, but I recently attended a class at an SCA event 
taught by someone who is, I believe, a trainer/inspector in the 
Pennsylvania Health Department, and they have apparently switched 
over to the Serve Safe curriculum, so we in the class were exposed to 
a small piece of it. This takes into account the fact that 
Pennsylvania used to have some of the most stringent standards for 
food hygiene and sanitation in the US. I can't imagine them relaxing 
those standards, but I can imagine them buying into a program with 
similar standards and a mechanism for uniform training and 
enforcement both in and outside of the US, which is what I gather the 
Serve Safe program is. Sort of a Geneva Convention for Food Safety.

Overall, it seemed fairly sensible and, as with the standards I'm 
used to dealing with, difficult but not impossible to follow, but at 
some cost to the flexibility and creativity of the cook if everything 
is followed to the letter. I suspect that each cook, as had 
previously been the case, has to be able to figure out which 
conditions are most likely to cause harm, realize that the rules are 
there to protect people from abuses and, to some extent, eliminate 
the need for common sense.

Hmmm. Am I making any sense here? I guess the bottom line is that my 
restaurant experience has always been that there was no way for a New 
York City four or five-star restaurant to completely comply with the 
rules and stay in business, so we would work in hugely flagrant 
violation of the rules, without actually making anybody sick, and we 
were set up to be more or less in compliance within about a minute of 
the arrival of an inspector.

It's a hard line to walk, but there are sensible ways to approach it, 
and I suspect when an area adopts the Serve Safe standards the end 
result doesn't create any big change in the short term: you work with 
common sense and keep your clientele and employees healthy or you go 
out of business.

Adamantius




-- 
  "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04