Kelly Smithson
Professor Rose
English 15
17 April 2013
Improving Food Safety in Restaurants
Atul Gawande is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. His current research is centered on improving performance in surgery, childbirth, and care of the terminally ill. He wrote an article in 2004 titled “The Bell Curve” It is about the need for improving health care for patients diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. In the article he made claims about treatment centers for cystic fibrosis being extremely successful in prolonging the life of the patients, but most are in just an average range. Gawande explains that “what you tend to find is a bell curve: a handful of teams with disturbingly poor outcomes for their patients, a handful with remarkably good results, and a great undistinguished middle”(4). This same concept of a bell curve could also be applied to restaurant health and safety rankings. I’m sure there is some restaurants that are just average when it comes to the hygiene of the facility, while other restaurants are so clean you could eat off of the floor. As restaurant owners there are many steps that you can do to be above average when it comes to the cleanliness of their facilities.
One extremely important or even first step when operating a successful restaurant is to make sure that local health inspectors are investigating the establishment properly. This is important to ensure that the restaurant owners are doing things correctly. It has been know that throughout the country the laws and regulations for restaurants can be interpreted differently. Restaurants are scored on a one hundred point scale when being inspected by local health municipalities (Rahm). They are also supposed to score in the same way for all establishments throughout the US. A journal article published through the CDC did an experiment to see if the state of Tennessee’s system was performing uniform and consistent inspections. They inspected all types of restaurants and came to the conclusion that “the most commonly cited violations were for unclean surfaces of equipment that did not contact food and floors or walls appearing unclean, poorly constructed, or in poor repair”(¶ 7). It is crucial that all parts of the back of the house should be cleaned properly even if food does not touch them. This is because these un-cleaned surfaces can attract critters and insects that can jeopardize the entire restaurant.
Another step to achieving high health and food safety rankings is to make sure that your staff is trained properly. Only foodservice workers who are healthy and practice good personal hygiene should be allowed to work in your restaurant. Workers can contaminate food by working while they are sick; touching pimples or sores, touching their hair, not wearing a Band-Aid and single-use gloves over sores and wounds, and not washing their hands properly before, during, and after handling food. If you have staff that have poor hygiene and food handling practices it could potentially cause cross contamination that could in effect get a customer sick. An example of cross contamination would be if a worker were prepping raw chicken on a cutting board with a cutting utensil, than proceed to start prepping lettuce on the same cutting board and with the same utensil without washing it in between tasks. Since lettuce is considered a ready to eat food, meaning it is not cooked before being served to a customer, it will be extremely susceptible to acquiring harmful bacteria from the raw chicken. This could in effect cause a customer to become sick.
Every restaurant uses, processes, and sells food in different ways. However, the general concepts of food safety are still the same. All food safety-training programs should contain three major factors that could cause food to become unsafe. Food must be kept out of harms way from employee mistakes, but if you don't train food workers what they are, they won't know why these factors are so important. One way to prevent this from happening is to make sure that employees are cooking food to the right temperature. You can reduce bacterial growth in potentially hazardous foods by limiting the time food is in the danger zone, 140° F to 41° F, during any steps of the food flow from receiving through service. Another prevention tip is to make sure your employees are not serving your customers expired food. On a daily basis “restaurant owners say they must continually keep up on health standards, and train their team members accordingly. This can be a daunting task for some restaurants, especially those that require an influx of seasonal workers”(Wagner ¶ 10). The basics can make all the difference.
The Greshville Inn, restaurant where I work, has always passed health inspections with flying colors. Considering the building is over a hundred years old the up keep is getting harder and harder. However, success can be reached with practice because “although it may be tempting to put off certain repairs or overlook a few minor health violations hoping that the inspector will not visit today, the better practice is to treat every day, as the day an inspector will show up. The saying ‘practice makes perfect’ holds true with health inspections. The best way to prepare for an inspection is by performing a self-inspection every week”(¶ 1-2). These small and probably annoying tasks may seem unnecessary at first but will make a huge difference in the long haul.
In conclusion, all dining experiences begin when the customer pulls into the parking lot. A restaurant may appear to be up to code on the outside and in the dining room, but no one ever really knows what the back of the house looks like and if it is just as maintained as the front of the house. Regardless of where the food is prepared for the customers it is the job of local inspection municipalities and the general managers of the establishment to make sure that restaurant operations are abiding by state regulations to ensure that food is being prepared safely and in a safe environment.

Works Cited Page
Gawande, Atul. "The Bell Curve." The New Yorker 6 Dec. 2004: 1-17. Web. 12 Apr 2013
Jones, Timothy F., Boris I. Pavlin, Bonnie J. LeFleur, Amanda Ingram, and William Schaffner. "Restaurant Inspection Scores and Food Borne Disease." Emerging Infectious Disease Journal 10 (2004): n. pag. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.
Rahm, Jason. "Restaurant Equipment and Supplies." Preparing Your Restaurant for a Health Inspection. Food Service Warehouse, n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2013

Wagner, Krystle. "Would You Eat there?" McClatchy - Tribune Business News 9 Mar 2013. ProQuest. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.