Post by Die Fledermaus on Mar 16, 2007 14:25:47 GMT -4
Op-Ed Contributor
Take a Rat to Dinner
By STEVEN A. SHAW
Published: March 16, 2007
IT’S difficult not to react viscerally to the images — repeatedly shown on television, in newspapers and on YouTube — of rats scurrying about the KFC/Taco Bell restaurant in New York City’s Greenwich Village at night, like villains in a twisted children’s book. Throughout history, after all, rats have been associated with plague and pestilence. From works of literature like Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground” to psychoanalytic texts like Freud’s case study “The Rat Man,” the symbolism of rats is uniformly negative. In metaphor, to smell a rat is to sense that something is amiss, and a snitch is called simply a rat. Rats have few fans.
But maybe we should pause to ask whether rats are the proper focus of our fears. Bubonic plague is not a public health issue in Greenwich Village, and the Centers for Disease Control report that, despite widespread superstition, rats have never been shown to carry rabies. It has been estimated that there are anywhere from one to nine rats per New Yorker. When late at night I walk my dog on my quiet Carnegie Hill block, I often hear rodents spelunking through the trash receptacles (my dog seems not to notice them).
Rats move freely from building to building: adult rats can, like the superhero Plastic Man, compress themselves to fit through spaces as narrow as half an inch. Their mobility makes them as easy to miss as they are to find. A rat-free city is no more possible than a germ-free or risk-free society. We can hope to manage rodents, roaches and other intruders down to an acceptable level, but they’ve always accompanied, and may outlast, human civilization.
Rats in restaurants, while distasteful, are more a distraction than a disaster for public health. As reported in this newspaper, flies — each one a potential airborne disease carrier — are a more dire threat. So are cows, sheep and pigs, whose excrement can contaminate food at its source with E. coli, as was recently believed to be the case with California spinach and with vegetables served at Taco Bell. And to echo the punch line of many a nature documentary, the greatest threat to restaurant sanitation is man: salmonella, for example, is typically initiated or spread through improper hand-washing, food handling or cooking.
Restaurants, moreover, are not the primary source of the food we eat. Most meals, even in the dining-obsessed culture of New York City, are taken in the home. We tend to think of our own kitchens as clean, but research published in 2004 by Janet Anderson of Utah State University paints a different picture.
Professor Anderson filmed 100 people preparing a meat entree and a salad at home. The subjects were told they were being observed for chicken and meatloaf recipes, but the study was actually about food safety. Of the 100 cooks, fewer than 50 washed their hands before preparing food; 30 failed to clean their cutting boards; 82 undercooked the chicken; 46 undercooked the meatloaf; and 24 didn’t store raw meat on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator (to keep any leaking juices from dripping onto other food).
An earlier study, by Audits International of Highland Park, Ill., evaluated 106 home kitchens in 81 cities in the United States and Canada. It found that 99 percent violated at least one critical food safety standard. Yet home kitchens are not subject to health inspections.
The recent rat scandal has led to dozens of restaurant closings in New York City, some forced and some voluntary. Such closings, even if they are short-term, can be devastating to a restaurant’s business. The restaurants, which often operate on razor-thin profit margins, lose income for days or weeks, and suffer public humiliation as well.
New Yorkers have a conflicted relationship to food safety. Few cities outside Japan can boast such a widespread love of sushi. Most self-respecting New Yorkers consider a medium-rare steak or hamburger to be a birthright, intrepid gourmets sneak untold amounts of French raw-milk cheeses through customs at Kennedy Airport, and the Grand Central Oyster Bar has been shucking as many as 5,000 oysters a day since 1913. Were rats a delicacy here, as they are in parts of China, we’d demand the right to rat tartare with a raw egg on top.
The food at fast-food restaurants, by comparison, often goes from frozen to fried, presenting little opportunity for contamination. Yet if a few rats infiltrate a fast-food restaurant’s dining room at night, we have a crisis of food safety confidence.
Perspective and proportion are the first casualties of hysteria, and food scares touch upon deep-seated fears about disease and control of what goes into our bodies. The American food supply, however, is by objective measures the safest it has ever been. Rats in restaurants shouldn’t be ignored, but health officials should be prioritizing and educating, rather than making decisions based on which YouTube videos upset people the most.
Steven A. Shaw is the author of “Turning the Tables: The Insider’s Guide to Eating Out.”
Take a Rat to Dinner
By STEVEN A. SHAW
Published: March 16, 2007
IT’S difficult not to react viscerally to the images — repeatedly shown on television, in newspapers and on YouTube — of rats scurrying about the KFC/Taco Bell restaurant in New York City’s Greenwich Village at night, like villains in a twisted children’s book. Throughout history, after all, rats have been associated with plague and pestilence. From works of literature like Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground” to psychoanalytic texts like Freud’s case study “The Rat Man,” the symbolism of rats is uniformly negative. In metaphor, to smell a rat is to sense that something is amiss, and a snitch is called simply a rat. Rats have few fans.
But maybe we should pause to ask whether rats are the proper focus of our fears. Bubonic plague is not a public health issue in Greenwich Village, and the Centers for Disease Control report that, despite widespread superstition, rats have never been shown to carry rabies. It has been estimated that there are anywhere from one to nine rats per New Yorker. When late at night I walk my dog on my quiet Carnegie Hill block, I often hear rodents spelunking through the trash receptacles (my dog seems not to notice them).
Rats move freely from building to building: adult rats can, like the superhero Plastic Man, compress themselves to fit through spaces as narrow as half an inch. Their mobility makes them as easy to miss as they are to find. A rat-free city is no more possible than a germ-free or risk-free society. We can hope to manage rodents, roaches and other intruders down to an acceptable level, but they’ve always accompanied, and may outlast, human civilization.
Rats in restaurants, while distasteful, are more a distraction than a disaster for public health. As reported in this newspaper, flies — each one a potential airborne disease carrier — are a more dire threat. So are cows, sheep and pigs, whose excrement can contaminate food at its source with E. coli, as was recently believed to be the case with California spinach and with vegetables served at Taco Bell. And to echo the punch line of many a nature documentary, the greatest threat to restaurant sanitation is man: salmonella, for example, is typically initiated or spread through improper hand-washing, food handling or cooking.
Restaurants, moreover, are not the primary source of the food we eat. Most meals, even in the dining-obsessed culture of New York City, are taken in the home. We tend to think of our own kitchens as clean, but research published in 2004 by Janet Anderson of Utah State University paints a different picture.
Professor Anderson filmed 100 people preparing a meat entree and a salad at home. The subjects were told they were being observed for chicken and meatloaf recipes, but the study was actually about food safety. Of the 100 cooks, fewer than 50 washed their hands before preparing food; 30 failed to clean their cutting boards; 82 undercooked the chicken; 46 undercooked the meatloaf; and 24 didn’t store raw meat on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator (to keep any leaking juices from dripping onto other food).
An earlier study, by Audits International of Highland Park, Ill., evaluated 106 home kitchens in 81 cities in the United States and Canada. It found that 99 percent violated at least one critical food safety standard. Yet home kitchens are not subject to health inspections.
The recent rat scandal has led to dozens of restaurant closings in New York City, some forced and some voluntary. Such closings, even if they are short-term, can be devastating to a restaurant’s business. The restaurants, which often operate on razor-thin profit margins, lose income for days or weeks, and suffer public humiliation as well.
New Yorkers have a conflicted relationship to food safety. Few cities outside Japan can boast such a widespread love of sushi. Most self-respecting New Yorkers consider a medium-rare steak or hamburger to be a birthright, intrepid gourmets sneak untold amounts of French raw-milk cheeses through customs at Kennedy Airport, and the Grand Central Oyster Bar has been shucking as many as 5,000 oysters a day since 1913. Were rats a delicacy here, as they are in parts of China, we’d demand the right to rat tartare with a raw egg on top.
The food at fast-food restaurants, by comparison, often goes from frozen to fried, presenting little opportunity for contamination. Yet if a few rats infiltrate a fast-food restaurant’s dining room at night, we have a crisis of food safety confidence.
Perspective and proportion are the first casualties of hysteria, and food scares touch upon deep-seated fears about disease and control of what goes into our bodies. The American food supply, however, is by objective measures the safest it has ever been. Rats in restaurants shouldn’t be ignored, but health officials should be prioritizing and educating, rather than making decisions based on which YouTube videos upset people the most.
Steven A. Shaw is the author of “Turning the Tables: The Insider’s Guide to Eating Out.”
