Hi everyone, it's Josh here, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode on Restaurant Inspections. It may just put you off eating at restaurants, ever again, I know it did for me. I haven't eaten in a restaurant since we released this episode, and that was back in twenty seventeen. Hold on, hold on, everyone, I'm sorry. Huh okay, everyone, Apparently that is not true. I do still eat at restaurants. Who knew? But at any rate, I hope you enjoy
the stomach churning Select. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland. Put the three of us in the room together with some raw chicken and some old mop you got yourself stuff.
You should know.
It's so gross, So Chuck, have you ever been to a restaurant and seen something that you weren't supposed to see and been like, oh, I just ate here.
I used to work at restaurants, as you know, and you know some of them were pretty gross.
I worked at a couple myself, and I never saw anything that I was like, this is wrong, But I realized over the years that I'm in the minority in that sense. Dude.
My first job as a busboy, that was one I saw some of the most horrific things in my life, mainly because they had Oh man, it was the people that worked there. They were dirty folks. They were dirty folks, and they were just they were people that didn't care about their own personal health and hygiene in any way. It was all gross, gross. Gross. I saw a guy when time should I even say.
This, yes, please dish.
And you're talking about kids working in the kitchen that are gross, like drop high school dropouts and hey, I'm not knocking you. If you dropped out of high school, Okay, go get that ged and keep at it. But these were not those people. They couldn't they couldn't even spell ged right.
They're like, I didn't get my kid.
Yeah, So these people, they were gross people. And I was thirteen and I couldn't speak up. I didn't know, like, I'm not going to go to the owner of the restaurant at thirteen because he didn't care. But I saw one of these dishwashers go into a walk in cooler and he was so mad about the schedule that they put him on. He took the lid off of a big, you know, fifteen gallon pot of Brunswick stew and he put his his showed foot and leg into it, no all the way to the bottom, and then took it
back out. And let me tell you, man, those shoes. I've never had more disgusting clothing in my life than the clothes that I worked in at a barbecue restaurant.
I know. They're like the whole reason crocs are in business is because it's the only thing that won't slide across the greasy, dirty floor of every single restaurant in every single city in the entire world.
Everything about that job was disgusting. They would drop meat on the ground and say good catch and laugh and then pick it up off the floor. It was like it was like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, The Jungle, like right before my little thirteen year old eyes, I grew up on that job. In many many ways.
The only way that it could have been more like The Jungle is if somebody actually died in the Brunswick stew and they just kept them in there.
It was so foul dude, that's crody. Man, I even know what our restaurant inspection score was.
I didn't even I saw nothing like that at the restaurants I worked in. I worked at a handful of them. Nothing like that.
Yeah, I worked at a bunch more was nothing like that.
This was so that was the worst of the worst. Oh my god, they're all burning in hell. Now, that's so grud.
I drove by that place the other day on the way to Emily's parents. I want a different route now. It's like a chee cheese a title max okay, which I don't even know what that is.
You can pawn your car title there for extremely exorbitant interest rates.
Gotcha? Well, the ghosts of of Rednecks passage well within those floors.
Wow, man, was the barbecue any good? I guess it's a moot point, right.
I still ate there?
Oh, dude, after the shoe thing, Yeah.
Man, I didn't. I was a kid. I didn't know. I mean I didn't have Brunswick stew that day, okay, good or ever again, I don't know. I just I didn't know any better. I was dumb.
You ate the Brunswick stew chuck, didn't I.
Got a lot smarter after that.
Well, I again, I've never seen anything in person, but I have I've been on the internet and seen things like that guy who peed in the coffee apparently every day, but I think that was at an office, not a restaurant. There's like this laundry list of fingers being found in food. I saw an article I think on like MPR something and it was like just basically the top five times fingers were found in food at restaurants and it happens a lot.
Yeah, just quickly, I should say that there. I feel bad for restaurant owners sometimes, especially at places like that that it's not like some nice kind of place in town. You can do all you can do, but you still can't account for some little jerk employee that's mad about something, that wants to spit in someone's food on camera. Yeah you know, yep, you can't. Just you can't watch everyone
one of the time. And that's usually what is a case like that, Like this dumb dishwasher kid, he just goes in the walk in says watch this.
Right, and there's there's I saw like there's a case to be made then for not hiring young people. Yeah, you hire people who have built a background for themselves, like a career for themselves.
All right, those are called good restaurants, right, that's the difference.
Yeah, I guess that is the difference. So in a sense, it's very much the owner's fault for being a cheap bastard and hiring people who put their shoed foot in the Brunswick stew Okay, so my point is this chuck that the shoed foot fingers in the uh at RB's like, all these little things that are just horrible and horrific and disgusting would be vastly worse and vastly more frequent were it not for a lone group of people, the thin blue line between us and utter chaos when it
comes to restaurants. The Health inspector, Yeah, this was I'm so excited about this episode. Yeah, oh it's gonna be a good one.
Man, Like, I don't know when you send it over, I was like, all right, But then it started reading and it was interesting and awesome and there's history to it. Yeah, and one of these consumer advocacy shows that we love to do. We're doing our little rough Nator impression.
Man, I love that guy. Great Amazica he's the tops. So restaurant health inspectors are something of a newish invention. They're certainly not really old, because at least in the United States, it wasn't until that book you mentioned, The Jungle was published in nineteen oh five that people like really sat up and took notice, and Congress acted almost immediately past the Pure Food and Drug Act the next year. That's the impact that Upston Sinclair's The Jungle had, Yeah.
Rightfully so.
And in the book, I mean he went undercover. He was a muckraking journalist, God bless him, and he went undercovered to basically just take notes on all the horrible things he saw in the meat packing industry and slaughterhouses, and he chronicled all the inhumane things that he saw in the way the animals were treated, but he also
saw the inhumane ways the workers were treated. But this, his book, had this impact, and Congress actually acted and they created the Pure Food and Drug Act, And one of the things that came out of that was what came to be known as the Food Code. And the food Code is basically like, here are the things that you should be doing in your restaurant to prevent from running a foul of the law or creating food borne illnesses.
Yeah, and like previous to the states were kind of taking care of their own health issues as best they could on their own. But then when that book came out, people were like, wait a minute, their ship and meat across state line. So the states aren't taking care of it themselves, meant going out everywhere. So it became a federal a federal thing to be regulated, and they.
Made a federal case. O.
Well they did, and along with the Pure Food and Drug Act, very importantly, the Federal Meat Inspection Act was passed in that same year. And because I think everyone, I mean even back then, like if you're grossed out in nineteen oh six, then they weren't as sensitive as we are today. So there was some gnarly stuff going on.
Dude, a guy falling into like a hot dog grinder.
Come on. So the food Code, the early food code that is was was sort of kind of the same stuff that we see today. Generally, we have refined everything over the years with science as to what's truly dangerous and not and how it gets dangerous. But even back then, they were concerned about like proper meat storage and food storage and temperatures of things, and the hygiene of employees and the premises themselves.
Yeah, because you know, what constitutes good practices hasn't changed all that much. But to respond to changes that do come about that do change best practices or are understanding of the science of food boorn illnesses. The Food Code was republished every year starting in nineteen ninety three. Every two years they updated it and republished it, and then in two thousand and one they moved it to four years.
But that to me is like that, friends, is the reason we pay taxes, so that there are people who are going around finding out the most cutting edge understanding of how we get sick from foods at restaurants, and then also finding out the exact ways to prevent this from happening, publishing it into a book, and distributing it to the states who then put it into practice. It takes money to do this kind of thing, but that's
why we pay taxes. And the next time somebody tells you that they don't care about government regulations and that we live in a nanty state, you remind them of what it would be like if they ate out at a restaurant without this kind of stuff.
Yeah, those people, we don't need government regulating stuff, all right, sir, Then you will be eating eyeball. Right, you'll be eating human eyeball In your next Frankfurter.
I will feed it to you myself.
So the Food Code today, just like the very first one back in nineteen thirty four, is voluntary. It is not federal law. It is still up to those states to go out and write their own rules. It aligns generally with the federal regulations and what the FDA recommends. And then it gets a little more confusing because when it comes down to actual restaurant inspections, there is no
federal or state inspector that comes in there. It's the city or the county who's going to be carrying this out, and they work with the state and then in turn the federal government to kind of all be on the same page.
Right. Yeah, I think it's almost kind of like the government's the one who has the funding to go actually look around and survey and find the science and put these best practices out. But it's the county or the city where the where the the rubber meets the road, the shoe, the shoe meets the pavement.
More like where the shoe meets the Brunswick stew.
That's so rotten. Not the Brunswick stew. That's like one of the best things I had at Barbarie.
Let's take a break, shall we. I'm gonna go brush my tongue with the toothbrush, okay, and I'll be right back.
All right, star sho.
Okay, and we're back and chuck. Let me smell your breath.
How's that?
Man? That is nice? Littlesterne, Yeah, if I do, detective, Is that Tom's toothpaste you used? No? Okay, what toothpaste do you use?
I use Uh, I'm using Crest right now?
Which one the orange one?
No?
Yeah? So the the the color of the packaging is orange. But the type of mint it's like called citrus mint. But you would never if you didn't see that, you wouldn't be like, oh, this is citrus mint. It's just its own type of very pleasant mint flavor sensation. Yeah.
I just use the regular uh, not not the white, but I think it's like the blue crests right now, pro health, I think, yeah, yeah, pro health. And then a dude use the Listerine. Now I've been on that for a solid couple of years. Yeah, because it's six and one, six benufits in one. Why are we talking about this?
I don't know.
Man, we're not even getting paid for that.
Maybe mine is Maybe mine is aqua fresh. It's either aqua fresh or crust, which everyone makes, citrus Mintu's what I use. But do you remember aim?
Oh? Yeah? What was that?
So that stuff? I think it's still around. It actually doesn't do anything as far as brushing your teeth goes, as far as toothpaste goes. But remember it came out in three different colors like green, red, and white, and it was just pretty.
But it's bad toothpaste.
I don't I'm not a big fan of it, but I love looking at it. How about that?
I remember that?
Yeah?
All right? So back to food inspection, now that our mouths are clean. There are usually three kinds of food safety inspections. You got your rag. The one that's done on the rag, it's known as a routine inspection, and that's the one where they come in might be every six months, might be every year and a half or so, depending on some stuff. We'll get to here in a bit. And that's the one where you go in and you just see the thing on the wall that gives it
the score. That's the one where you're working in the restaurant and the owner and the manager freak out. They're like, oh god, no, no, they do the second they walk through the door. Although I will say in New Jersey, where I worked at the store in basking Ridge, New Jersey, we were always great. They took it really seriously. Yeah, every time the inspector came by, they were like, come on in.
That's the way it should be.
It's a big shout out to the store in basking Ridge, New Jersey.
Way to go to the store.
That place is great, and that's how And they had a restaurant group and they had like six restaurants and they're all done the right way.
I don't think you could really have a restaurant group without approaching food inspection and health standards in that way too.
Yeah, I mean it's just dumb.
Not too And from what I saw too, we also kind of did you read that Mental Floss article I sent. Yeah, So one of the things it's called twelve Secrets of Restaurant Health Inspectors. One of the things they've point out is that usually the bigger, the chain. So whether it's a restaurant group on up to a global chain like you know one of those guys, Sure, oh wow, cheeks buddy, you're probably going to see something close to one hundred every time. And the reason why is because they have
a lot of skin in the game. They have a lot to lose, right if, like they pointed out with Chipotle, like there were one or two locations of Chipotles where some bad cilantro got some people sick with E. Coli, but all Chipotle suffered as a result, people just stopped going. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars and came probably pretty close to going under there for a little while. And I think they're still definitely callling their way out
from under it. So they don't just rely on state, county, or city health inspectors. They do their own. They hire their own third parties to come in and carry out health inspections much more more frequently than the government's doing, just to make sure that they're up to standards.
Yeah, so your your local fast food chain is more likely to be super clean than the mom and pop in theory, but in my opinion, you're also more likely going to find the kid in the kitchen that goes, hey watch this.
Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a trade off, and that's that's it. Yeah, because it's definitely not to say that, you know, mom and pop places are inherently unsafe. If it's a family business, you have just as much skin in the game as a global a global restaurant chain because this is your family's livelihood. So yeah, you're gonna take it seriously.
Uh So, getting back, the other two types of inspections real quick, besides the routine are the follow up investigation where they do say like, all right, you need to fix these things. I'll be back next Thursday, or I'll be back tomorrow depending on what's going on, right, or I'll shut down your restaurant while you fix the stuff it's so bad. And then there are inspections that are triggered by a consumer plants.
Yes, that's the one where they like use the bat signal, but instead of a bat, it's like a fork in the sky and then the restaurant inspector swoops in. It's like I'm here, I'm here. Everybody calm down.
Yeah, so I mentioned that people restaurants will be inspected maybe every six months, maybe every year a year and a half. They are. It's not willy nilly. They are assessed a risk factor as an establishment by the county or the you know whatever local municipality is carrying this out. And that has to do with a bunch of things. Sometimes it's the kind of food. Like if you're serving sushi, you might get inspected a little more sushi sushi because
you're serving raw fish. That I didn't say sushi that done, shushi that done?
Did I No?
No, no, oh no, that's Steve brule, Steve rule.
Shushy sham whishy.
That I thought. I thought it was my nising tooth. Or if you're cooking meat or whatever, raw meat, you might get inspected a little more than a deli that just has you know, pre prepared meats and foods.
Yeah, like those cold cuts are already cooked. It's not like you're they're serving you raw turkey slices like it's already cooked. They're just putting it together onto a sandwich. Yeah, that's a low risk restaurant comparatively speaking.
Yeah, you know, always gets me, even though I love a ero, is when I see the thing on the spit next to the heat lamp rotating around, right. I always just think, how safe is that?
I would guess if it's operating in the United States safe enough. Okay, that's the whole point of restaurant inspectors, so that you don't have to ask that question. That you can look at that and say, somebody who knows what they're doing has inspected that and determined that is not a threat to my health.
Maybe it just creeps me out to look at it.
No, I'm with you, I understand. I also want to say, there are some places where you go in and you're like, this is clearly in violation of some health codes. I have no idea how this place is allow to stay like this, but it's still worth it. And I would direct you to Ann's Ann's Ghetto Burger. Oh yeah, right by your house.
Yeah, that's just down the street.
Yes you have, you had one.
I've never had an ans because I thought that she left and it closed. But it's still going. Is she's still running it?
You know? I don't know. She had been threatening to like retire for twenty years or something, but I knew she wanted to get bought out and didn't want to just close it down. So hopefully she was able to retire. That's my hope.
All I know is the Wall Street Journal said it was I think maybe the best hamburger in the United States.
The Wall Street Journal ain't lying, you know, yes, But if you go there, that's like decades worth of Greece just on the vent around the or the backsplash, like the stainless steel backsplash or whatever splatter guard behind the griddle, and you're like, there's how does she how did she get away with that? And then you take a bite of it and you're like, oh, because it matters not at all compared to this burger.
Well, maybe she is compliant because that is the second risk factor involved with how often you're going to get inspected, which is if do you have a list of complaints or a record of violations on your record, then you're gonna be on their frequent visitor list, right you know.
Yeah, yeah, and especially if you've ever been the source of a food born illness, you're on you're a high risk automatically.
Yeah, probably permanently, yeah, I would think so.
And depending on where you are, you know, like you're going to get lots of visits after that. That's probably aside from maybe people getting shot in your restaurant, a food born illness is probably the worst thing that can
happen in your restaurant. Yeah, I would guess, and you know, whether you're a new restaurant, well, if you're a new restaurant in particular, I should say I think the standard is is that depending on where you fall as far as what kind of restaurant you are, whether you're a deli serving cold cuts or a sushi place serving raw seafood, you're assigned like an initial risk assessment, and then depending on that risk assessment, if you're a sushi place, say
they're gonna come visit every three months for the first year, or if you're a deli, they might come once every year and a half. And then depending on how you perform in those inspections, those regular routine inspections that are basically predetermined by the type of restaurant you are, that
schedule can either diminish or increase. So let's say that deli is found to be in violation pretty frequently every eighteen months, they're going to start getting inspected every twelve months or every six months.
Yeah, or that.
Sushi place that's getting inspected every three months or six months. If it's just painfully obvious that they are top notch pros who are taking this quite seriously and never get caught for anything, then six months may end up turning into a year. Who knows.
Yeah, you may have heard reports on the news too that food inspectors have racist policies where they will go after ethnic restaurants more often.
No, I hadn't heard that, is that right?
Yeah, I've seen reports on stuff like that, Wow, that they get inspected more frequently if you're like, have an ethnic restaurant.
That's pretty rotten.
But there is a food safety expert at North Carolina State a named Ben Chapman that says there's really no data to back that up. He said, but there could be biases through consumer complaint systems. Oh and they did sort of a just a snapshot from Yelp reviews, which say what you want about Yelp reviews, they're pretty much the worst thing ever. Right, But if you look at Yelp reviews, you do a search for food poisoning, and close to seventy percent of the time they were ethnic
restaurants where people complained about food poisoning. So I see this food is weird. I don't recognize it that some bias comes in through that.
But that makes sense. Then Chuck like if if if yelp is a proxy for the number of times somebody might call in a complaint. That's one of the ways that food inspector goes out to inspect a restaurant is when somebody the public, said, you know, calls and says something or complains. So yeah, I mean that that makes utter, incomplete sense. Have you ever called and complained about a restaurant?
Have you ever called the health department? No? I never have either, and they're actually after researching this article, I was like, there, I can think of it. At least one time when I could have and should have called just got under cooked chicken, and you mean and I both got very sick for like the whole weekend, and I kept calling this place like like, what are you guys going to do about this? You have to do something, and they just got less and less interested the more
frequently I called them. By the by like the fourth or fifth time, I was like, we're still suffering. I just wanted to let you know, we're laying around throwing up. And they didn't do anything about it. There was no We're sorry there. I think they actually didn't believe me. Maybe, But now that I've read this, I'm like, I totally should have called the health department on those guys, which it was in Atlanta.
I think I remember that. Actually we got.
So we were sick for an entire weekend. Pretty nice, right, yes, yeah, totally remember, right across from where we used to work and Buckhead actually, and they could not have cared less. And that's what ticked me off.
Oh you were calling the restaurant over there, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, Oh I thought you called the health inspector over No.
But now now I'm like, why wouldn't Why didn't we just call it health inspector? Now I would call for sure now that I've done this research, because it's not like like what you're doing is helping other people from from before, from the same fate.
Befall, Yeah, you're not being a rat, right right.
Which is another thing that health inspectors look out for.
All right, Well, let's talk about that when you when this is how that this goes down. There are unannounced visits, like I said, so I've worked at I've worked at I don't know, like probably four or five places over the years, and two of them were pretty bad. The aforementioned barbecue place, and then where I worked in college wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great. It was a typical like college town Mexican joint, but it wasn't like the
super professional other restaurants that I've worked at. But at those first two places, I remember when the restaurant inspector walked through the door, a panic set in. Invariably the one of the like the GM or whoever the manager was, would immediately confront in a nice not confront but greet the person and send you know, the understanding was someone go back to the kitchen and tell everyone that the inspectors here. And judging from that Mental Floss article you sent,
that's exactly how it works. And for that reason, the very first thing a good health inspector does is kind of barge through there and say, I'm going straight into the kitchen right the second right, because they know what's.
Going on, right, that's they have to or else a whole bunch of violations get covered up really quickly.
Very quickly.
And so in that Mental Plus article, basically they said they needed to do like a brisk like run walk through the kitchen as fast as they could.
Isn't that scary?
It is? But you do you you scales, like what do you do? And like just stand there and freeze. That's what they should do, is be like everybody freeze and then like have their finger and thumb in the shape of a gun because I don't think they're allowed to actually carry guns.
Well, this one health inspector in the mental plaus thing said, we want to see the things that won't be there in another three to four minutes.
Right, But that's the thing. But I mean it could be anything like there's there's like if you are sitting there making food and you have like a cup of coke, right, you're not supposed to have that.
There, Yeah, or in your cell phone in the kitchen.
It's another big one too. I'll bet that is probably the most frequent violation today.
They're covered in poop.
Do you ever see something like have you ever just stopped and looked at people on the street like with their phones, Like they'll just be stopped mid something like they have like a shovel like propped up against their shoulder, just looking at their phone with their mouth hanging open, and it's like crazy, We're turning into like a society of zombies. Man, how do you.
Stare at your phone? I've seen you do that. You do it in a smarter looking way.
I do the thing where I'm like stroking my chin thoughtfully right in your mouth closed exactly. I've got like one eyebrow arched, all right.
So the first thing they inspect, obviously the kitchen. The manager or the owner whoever is there on point is with the inspector the whole time, because they're saying like, hey, like little things like that ketchup bottles disgusting, Like why don't you go ahead and have someone clean that up. I won't dock you a point, right, but just get it clean.
And the guy wipes it down. He's like, no, that brand, it's Hunt, So I get some hines in here. It's disgusting.
But the first thing they inspect are the dynamic areas, which are the kitchen food preparation areas. Basically, anywhere where there's food actively out is the first place they'll go.
Right, that's the static area, dynamics.
The dynamic okay, and then you start with the one hundred points. By the way, I don't know if we mentioned.
That, which I think is kind of optimistic. It's saying, like, I want to believe the best thing you So everybody starts with a hundred and then we start deducting from there.
Yeah, then it just gets sad.
So one of the first things they're looking for is employee hygiene because remember what you mentioned, like way back and when the Food and Drug Act was creating, the Food Code was first established, there were a lot of basic tenets that were put forth back then, and one of them was, you're the people who cook the food
need to be clean as a whistle. And that's one of the big things that the health inspector is looking for, like are they wearing gloves, which, by the way, is not to say that if an employee's wearing gloves that you're totally covered. The gloves are supposed to be a
fail safe to good hand washing. Yeah, so you want them to be washing their hands very frequently and then wearing gloves on top of that, but then on top of that not doing things like using their cell phone with the gloves one, because you've just automatically contaminated them and totally defeated the purpose of using gloves at that point. Right, So there's a lot of hygiene things that are being
taken into account. But how do you tell whether people are washing their hands when you're just walking into a kitchen. Of course they're going to wash their hands in front of you in the way that they're supposed to be, but how do you know they're doing it routinely?
Chuck? Well, yeah, and we should that there is a way you're supposed to wash the hands. You don't rinse them off and just dry them with the towel that's sitting by the sink, or just blow on them. You rinse, you put on the soap, you scrub for twenty seconds, then you dry off with a one use towel.
And good old, unsustainable made out of tree paper towel.
Uh yeah, Or if you're a really fancy restaurant, you can just have like cashmere towels laying around as long as you throw them away after it.
Right, you have to throw them away.
But your little trick, I know where you were leading. How you can tell is this one very crafty restaurant inspector in the Mental Floss article said, they go in the first thing they do because it takes them a couple hours at a just sort of a normal sized restaurant, four or five hours at a big hotel restaurant.
M h.
He said, he puts an X on the paper towels, and if he goes back at the end of his inspection, then that X is still in the paper towel, then he knows hands are not being washed. Right, very sneaky, pretty clever.
Yeah, yeah, so I guess we just gave it away though, So now all the people are going to go check their paper towel rolls.
H bet they're other ways.
Yeah, that was just a setup to nudge them into the actual way he's telling.
Yeah, like wash your hands.
Food is another big one too, right, you want to make sure that the food is being properly stored and properly cooked. And apparently there is a danger zone between I think like zero and one hundred and forty that you want to hit or that you want to stay
outside of. So basically you want your food, especially like raw meat, to be stored at a temperature frozen right or else kept at forty degrees fahrenheit forty degrees celsius or below for fridges, and then when you cook it, you have to cook it to at least one hundred and sixty degrees internal temperature for beef, pork, all those guys, and then one hundred and forty five for fish. And if a restaurant's not doing that, that's a big that's a big one, as we'll see.
Yeah, I mean, the best way to think about food storage is without getting into the specific temperatures. Is if it's supposed to be cold or frozen, it should be cold or frozen. If it's supposed to be hot, it should be hot. Is that middle ground is where you're in big trouble exactly. They talked about lukewarm being the big enemy, right, that's never good lukewarm.
I'm trying to think of a time when lukeworm is preferable with anything.
It just sounds gross. I like my food really hot too.
Yeah.
Like That's the one thing I will send something back is if it's was clearly made a little earlier than the rest of the party at the table and it's sort of lukewarm, I'm like, nah, man, I want I want steam coming off this thing.
Yeah. Yeah, they throw the microwave, yeah they do, and then they're like, oh, I guess you want a little spit on that too.
Apparently soup should be like the way you reheat things is a big deal because obviously that Brunswick stew, you don't just throw it out every night. You put it back in the walk in so some jerk can step in it. But when you bring soups and brols back to heat, you have to reboil them entirely right from their refrigerated state.
Which makes sense, but that's never very good for food. If it's already prepared, once you reboil it, probably you're just gonna want to throw that away then really, yeah, man, it toughens everything up, or else it over cooks it. It's already been cooked once, so when you bring it to a boil, you're really cooking it again. And for food born illness is that's a good way to treat it, but it doesn't necessarily make for the most appetizing food.
Right. I don't know if I agree with that, but that's all right, that's what I'm going With frozen meat. You don't just say, hey, Jimmy, throw that frozen bird out on the table and leave it there till this evening, right, But you don't just leave food out to thaw. There are proper ways of falling and bringing things back to correct temperature. Right.
And then so let's say you have a place where you're cutting up that thawed chicken that was properly thawed, and then you set the knife down and somebody else picks it up and they start cutting lettuce with it. That's cross contamination. That is extremely dangerous because as you know, very few people cook their lettuce before they eat it in a salad. It's raw, and so now it has raw chicken juice on the lettuce that you're eating raw and uncooked, and you can die from that. So cross
contamination is a big one they look for. They also it can be a little more simple, like with something like silverware. From what I saw, if the silverware is dirty or smudgie, that is a big problem because that means usually that the whole kitchen is dirty. There's a lot of that's like a big red flag that apparently health health inspectors will will tell you that if the silverware is dirty, it usually is indicative of just a dirty restaurant in general. Yeah, and I've always heard I
don't know if it's an urban legend or not. But you know, like the just the plastic soda cups that like a lot of restaurants will have. Have you ever heard that it's not possible for them to get to the temperature needed to kill any bacteria on them, because they'll melt otherwise, so that when you drink out of them, they've not really been sanitized from before.
I have not heard that. But as someone who has worked as a dishwasher, you don't say, well, I'm going to watch these things at this temperature. You just throw everything through there.
Yeah, you don't have any choice in what temperature. It's all prescribed for you. You're just basically putting them on the tray and sliding them through, pulling the door down, and then it washes them and you lift the door up and pull them out.
Yes, and I will say one of my dreams though, is to have one of those in my home.
Those I can't remember what they're called, but they are wonderful.
It's pretty great. Yeah, it just watches everything like super fast.
So that's the dynamic areas, right, Yes, there's also the static areas where it's things like well, the dishwashing area actually apparently is a static area. It doesn't change very much where you store cleaning products that kind of stuff. I guess you get points deducted if your cleaning products or your toxic chemicals are not in their marked original package.
Yeah, that's not good because.
You could they can be mistaken for oil and vinegar or something like that.
Yeah, and they're gonna check. The static areas include a lot of things that you don't think would even fall into the purview of a restaurant inspector. They're going to look at your HVAC systems and your vents and your smoke detectors. They're gonna look at your dining room and the floors and the ceilings and your ceiling vans, and your dumpster behind and your grease trap. Like they look at everything.
Right, which is good. And another one that they take a look at that I think is probably a big problem for restaurants in a lot of ways are ice machines. There's a lot of parts to ice machines that are out of view.
This thing scared me in mental floss now.
That can like grow mold pretty easy, and not just the ice machine right where they're like scooping ice out, which is another thing too, Like there better be an ice scoop, right, it can grow mold in the ice machine. But also those shoots where ice comes out of like a like a beverage dispenser, those are usually serviced by the company that makes the beverages that it's dispensing, and so it would be up to that company to clean those out, which means that they get even less attention
than the rest of the restaurant. So the next time you're getting like ice out of beverage dispenser, like, get your flash light out of your pocket and look up there and see if you see any mold and then just raise holy hell if you do.
Yeah. And I'm not a big fan of the serve yourself soft drink stations anyway, for you know, out there with the public. I don't think think the public should ever have access to something. That's why, well that's not the reason. But buffets are just so gross and creepy.
I haven't been to a buffet in good Lord, I don't know, twenty years, I know, but the thought of a buffet, I know they have the sneeze guard, but people like scooping in and serving themselves their own food from a trough is so weird and gross and archaic that I can't believe people still do that.
Well. I mean also, like even if you're using like a spoon, like a serving spoon to scoop something out, which you are, so did the person before you, right, and that means you're touching the same serving spoon and then going back and using your hands to go eat, So you just touched whatever the other person had on their hands, and now you're coming in contact with your mouth. It's a flawed system, for sure.
It is. Because what you're saying is, I'm going to count on the three hundred people that have eaten here today before me are all completely hygienic. All their hands have been washed.
Yeah, Timothy, poop hands isn't among them.
No one did a single gross thing, like if a tater tot fell off the spoon flicked it back in with her finger, Like, no one did anything wrong at all. I just no way, not even like whole foods or someplace. Those are all gross to me.
Oh yeah, whole foods would count with that too, huh.
Although I do like a build drone salad thing every once in a while. That's the exception.
Good salad bar. Yeah, it's tough to turn down. I'm with you. Well, let's take a break, think a little more about salads, and we'll be right back. Stuff shit, all right, we're back, Charles.
Let's talk about point deductions. A.
Yes, let's remember we said that restaurant inspectors are very optimistic and they start out with one hundred.
It just goes down from there.
And again, you know, since these are done like city by city or county by county, like everybody has like their own methods or whatever. But usually, and I think the FDA has pointed out, like there are five things
that you're really looking for, like five general categories. Improper storage of food as far as temperature goes, yes, inadequately cooked food, equipment that's contaminated, sources that are unsafe, that are an unsafe supply of the ingredients, right, so like if it turns out like the goat is coming from
their buddies farm, that might be a problem. And then personal hygiene of the people who work there right, right, And so depending on some of those, especially if there's multiple ones of these, these are big ones, they will probably be a high priority Type one or critical violation any of those, Yes, and then there's also other ones where they're like, this is not that big of a deal, but it's definitely something that needs to be paid attention to.
Those fall after those usually, and it can be anything from like a dentic can that could conceivably contain botulism but definitely hasn't been proven to contain botulism being thrown away, to there being a hole in the screen door that's left open for some reason.
Yeah, and these as far as deducting individual points that you'll see on the wall when you walk in and if you don't look at that piece of paper when you walk into a restaurant, I don't know what's going on in your brain. You should always do that, sure, But like a static violation like hey, there were some chairs that had bad legs, your ceiling fan was pretty dusty, those will be like a point each, maybe a couple of points for a minor infraction like you're cleaning product,
like a found a roach. You know, the chef has a cell phone in the kitchen. That's a couple of points all the way up to four and five points. And those that's when you're talking about your your fridge is broken and it is not up to temperature and everything in there is at risk, and that's when they can actually shut you down until you get it fixed.
Yeah, which I got the impression from this article that that is a it's a rarity that the health inspector wants to air on the side of the restaurant staying open and solving everything as quickly as it can, while also it's business not suffering unnecessarily. So if your restaurant gets shut down temporarily, like that violation was significant enough that people were at an immediate risk of getting sick from visiting your.
Restaurant, exactly.
Yeah, it's a big deal. In other words, it's as big a deal as you would think.
Yeah, but with those point deductions, if you go in and you see like a seventy two on a restaurant score sheet, it's probably not twenty eight individual small violations. There are probably some four and five pointers in there, and you should probably think about eating there or you know, it says in the art in this article. You can go to the website and really break down because those aren't for the public to necessarily be able to digest easily.
But if you do look at them, if you can get close to them, you can actually look and see the little category for each thing. Sometimes it's behind the register. They may not like you poking around.
Well, the health departments usually put them on the web these days.
Yeah, that's well saying like you can investigate online, but in the restaurant itself it is marked. It's you know, a bunch of tiny little letters and categories, and you can give it a look. And you know, as long as I wouldn't spend too much time there, like, just go by that initial score, and if you're really like, well I got to see what those eighteen points were deducted for, I would just turn around and walk out.
Yeah, especially if there's an identical place, like right across the street. Yeah, but that is a pretty good point, because when you think about it, most people just see that big score prominently displayed, whether it's like an A or a B or a C or like a eighty five or a ninety eight or whatever, and it's not
really meant to be shorthand for the public. I mean, I guess it is in a way where it's like, hey, buddy, you're really taking a gamble here at like seventy five, But when it's really high up, it does seem to be kind of an indicator like this one's aoka in my book, that's not really what the restaurant inspection report is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a lot
more granular than that. And so to really tell whether you're running a risk it eating in a restaurant or not, you actually do have to go to the trouble of looking up what the violations were and then even then judging for yourself, because short of health inspector deciding to shut the restaurant down and making the decision for you that you can't go there, they're not saying like don't eat here, Like if it passes, if it passes inspection enough to stay open, then as far as the county
Health Department's concerned, it's good enough for you to be eating there. But that might not really jibe with your own definition. So to get that information, you have to go find out what they're why points were deducted.
Yeah, and you can't. It's either the mental plus or own article point out that just because someplace has a bad rating doesn't mean they haven't fixed things and it's fine now. And just because as a great rating doesn't mean they're not in violation that day. These inspectors come every six months to a year for a couple of hours during a lunch shift, and it is a snapshot of what occurred on that day. So there is no like failsafe for a consumer. You just gotta, you know,
did the best. You can, cross your fingers the dice, everything's okay in.
There, or just cook it home and boil everything, including your lettuce.
Oh, boil lettuce delicious?
What kidd oh, I didn't know. If I was missing out on something, then you got anything else on restaurant inspections.
Just this one more little tidbit from a mental floss that I thought was pretty great. Let's here is that this one restaurant inspector said that he can smell cockroaches in the air at this point.
Yeah, that's a real problem with cockroaches. Though, don't you think to be able to smell I guess it'd be an infestation, is what he's.
Yeah, he said, you can walk in, take a deep breath, and he said it's kind of a nutty, oily smell that you After years on the job, I can identify it.
It's like I still get hungry every time I smell it.
I got a lot of roaches in my house right now, and it's really pissing me off. I don't clean house, you know. It's not yea gross, it's just, uh, this summer was just real kind of muggy and dankins.
Do you have a lot of cardboard boxes in your attic or basement? No?
I don't know where they're coming from, Like we see them outside all over the place, so sure, I don't. Maybe it's at swale Pond from the Permaculture episode.
Maybe. Yeah, the permaculture lady is like, I forgot to tell you you're gonna have roaches.
It's the only new thing, right.
I don't know, man, good good luck of godspeed though, go find the most sustainable way to treat it. I'll be interested to hear what you come up with.
Well, so far it's been the flip flap method.
Oh poor roaches. No.
Uh.
If you want to know more about cockroaches, or restaurant health inspections or flip flops, you can type those words in the search bar houseofworks dot com. And I said that, which means it's time for listener mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this a great gross way to finish this gross ish podcast excellent. Hey guys, wanted to regale you with the story of how you two contributed my fantastic relationship my wonderful girlfriend. Last summer and fall, I was traveling across the country, camping, going to national parks, and I wound up in moab Utah at canyon lands and arches and met a smart, fun girl at a brewery and we made a date to go hiking. The next day, I picked her up and we went on
a wonderful little hike and disaster struck. Turns out months of cheddar broughtwurst and beer wasn't great for my digestive system, and I felt horrible and I had an inescapable urge to take the Browns to the super Bowl. Unfortunately, I was miles away from relif and I ran out of excuses to keep stopping and standing still for a moment. Hey, look at that arch again.
Oh I can't.
So I had to tell her the horrible truth on our first date, and I was sure it would ruin it. Eventually, I made my way to a bathroom, shoved some poor people aside, and safely made it back to town. But I was horribly embarrassed and sure I had ruined everything. On the way back to town, she asked if she could put a podcast on, and she played me your episode about poop. No nice, How about that?
She's got a good sense of humor.
Great sense of humor. I've never been as happy to hear two men describing fecal matter. At that point, I knew anyone could spend a date almost pooping in their pants into an excuse to share their podcasts favorites. As a keeper, we've been together over a year now. We love listening to your new episodes while we hike in camp and poop.
I guess they've got to remember the love seat that Saturday Night Live commercial. It was like the two toilets facing each other. You could hold hands while you poop.
Exactly. I couldn't be happy to find a new favorite thing to listen to and a wonderful new girlfriend at the same time. So I want to thank you guys. If you ever get back to Denver, maybe next year, we don't know yet. I'll be buying tickets as soon as I hear the announcement. That is from Tom and he said, if you do read this in the air, please give a shout out to.
Alice Nice, Tom and Alice Yeah, way to go kids. Thanks for writing in Tom Nice story. If you want to get in touch with this, like Tom did lay it on us, send us an email to Stuff podcast at iheartrate com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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