[Sca-cooks] I'm back
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Fri Aug 20 12:05:59 PDT 2004
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
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