The issue of poor inspection across the state has become a serious health hazard recently. The major drawbacks include infrequency of inspections and ignorance of the question once people report sanitary violations. To begin with, I would like to dwell upon the issue of food safety establishments’ attitude towards the complaints of the citizens. The friend’s story mentioned in the discussion serves as a vivid example of the incompetence of the current healthcare system. The safety of eating out at a restaurant depends on a series of factors. Some of them include sanitary conditions in the kitchen and among staff members, quality and accuracy of meal preparations, and techniques of food containing (USDA, 2017). Thus, no establishments are to be trusted when it comes to food safety. For instance, over the last decades, such famous US chain restaurants as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and Wandy’s experienced the cases of mass food poisoning (Myers, 2016). The incidents became resonant due to their publicity and food safety inspections’ reaction. However, many situations when local restaurants were reported to poison customers are deprived of such public light.
To my mind, although the “self-inspection” approach is, by all means, not an option to maintain food safety policy, the current inspecting system is also corrupted and requires serious modifications. In order to make people feel safe and protected, the process of food safety investigations should become public and involve more communication with customers. In the case of the discussion, a person was not contacted and hence, unaware of inspection realization. It is quite likely that food safety institutions did not even bother to launch an investigation on the topic, which implies official misconduct. As such ignorance leads to criminal liability, full-scale investigations on the cases of food poisoning are beneficial for both the government and customers.
Another important point mentioned in the discussions concerned the relative frequency of food safety inspections. The examination of food policies should be exhaustive on all levels starting from food production on the export markets, which provide the establishments with goods (Mayett-Moreno & López Oglesby, 2018). Once the quality of products is satisfying, the chances of food poisoning are a priori lower. The next level of securing food safety concerns appointed inspections. Although the studies show that food quality control within the US is higher than in developing states, the program still requires some changes (Carneiro & Kaneene, 2017). First of all, I entirely agree with the discussion’s argument on the low-frequency rate when it comes to planned inspection. Examining restaurants on a yearly basis has a few major drawbacks. The first one implies the absence of precise data on the subject, as there are dozens of customers who visit the establishment daily. Hence, their live feedback matters more than inspection data recorded once in 365 days.
Once the inspection is held, another concern implies the collected data’s relevance. Frequently, yearly food safety inspections take place in a certain period of the year that tends to repeat. Hence, some restaurant owners are interested more in avoiding penalties and closing the establishment than in providing safe and quality service. In order to remain in the market, restaurants tend to get fully prepared for the inspection, whereas a series of rules can be violated throughout the year. As was already mentioned in the discussion, while expensive restaurants with a certain reputation rate care about their customers, many fast-food chains often violate sanitary rules predetermined by the FDA. Hence, the solution here would be to launch unexpected food safety inspections on a more regular basis.
References
Carneiro, P., & Kaneene, J. B. (2017). Food inspection services: A comparison of programs in the US and Brazil. Food Control, 80, 314-318.
Mayett-Moreno, Y., & López Oglesby, J. M. (2018). Beyond food security: challenges in food safety policies and governance along a heterogeneous agri-food chain and its effects on health measures and sustainable development in Mexico. Sustainability, 10(12), 4755.
Myers, D. (2016). 11 times chain restaurants gave people food poisoning. Web.
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). (2017). Safe food handling fact sheets. Web.