Raising food handling standards in eating establishments
Business Editorial
Stabroek News
March 2, 2007
With the start of the 2007 Cricket World Cup now a little more than two weeks away the various last minute preparations for hosting an unspecified number of visitors - no one appears, at this stage, to have any clear idea as to how many guests we can expect - appear to be kicking into high gear. There is, for example, a sense of hustle and bustle to fix some roads, desilt canals and clear sections of the city of piles of garbage and while even the City Council now concedes that the outcomes of these quick fix arrangements will fall short of the urban makeover that we were hoping for a year ago, we can at least hope that our visitors will be spared the worst excesses of what those of us who live here must endure every day.
Some of the more worrying concerns associated with our state of preparedness to entertain our CWC guests have surfaced in the service sector. Not least of these has been the failure by the various eating establishments over the years to cultivate sound and hygienic food management practices. The recent World Cup-related training and sensitization exercise in food handling which, we understand, targeted more than 2,000 persons in the various hotels, restaurants, fast food establishments and snackettes around the city revealed that proper food-handling practices were entirely alien to many of these establishments and that the food-handling culture of even the more "up market" establishments left much to be desired.
The problem, of course, is inextricably linked to a culture of indifference in the food industry that has manifested itself in a failure on the parts of the relevant municipal and state agencies to enforce the laws governing the operation of eating houses and the concomitant casualness of owners and operators who simply use that official indifference to their advantage. The situation appears even more absurd when the same institutions that either neglect to enforce the laws or ride roughshod over them speak glibly about the country's tourism prospects. Evidently, we are yet to make the simple connection between high standards of food hygiene and food handling practices and the development of a highly regarded tourism sector. As the recent media reports about a rat-infested fast food restaurant in the United States illustrates, bad news travels fast.
While we have been given assurances that owners and workers at the various establishments in the city and its environs have now been briefed as to what is expected of their practices and their standards during Cricket World Cup the question is, of course, whether those will be adhered to under the pressure of the increased patronage that many of them will experience during the World Cup period. It would also be the greatest of travesties if such adherence were to last only for the period of the event and not be maintained and even improved in the longer term. For if we simply put on a show for appearances sake then return to our old ways after the visitors have left one would be entitled to wonder whether those of us who use these eating houses every day are not entitled to the same standards that we are seeking to offer our visitors over the next few weeks. And can we seriously aspire to attract the volume of tourism that we are hoping for beyond Cricket World Cup if we allow those enhanced standards to evaporate the moment the last visitor has left rather than seek to build upon those standards?
The various departments that have been involved in the current food handling and food hygiene training exercise and whose job it is to enforce the law on a full-time basis all complain that they lack the resources to sustain a programme that is not only costly but also requires skilled persons. That, of course, is no excuse. We cannot expect to benefit from the patronage and the financial returns of a tourism industry unless we are prepared - the government, the private sector and the municipality, that is - to invest in the infrastructure that will bring the tourists here in the first place. And there is really no reason why every food-related establishment should not be required to pay for those services that have a bearing on the standards that the law requires them to maintain.