The NYT explains the recent egg controversy at the excellent Pegu Club:
Nevertheless, on that fateful evening, an inspector from the New York City Department of Health cited Pegu Club, at 77 West Houston Street in SoHo, for serving the MarTEAni without telling the customer who ordered it that it contained raw egg. The notice said it was a serious infraction that required a court appearance.
Raw eggs are among the ingredients most fervently embraced by cocktail revivalists who have sought out new techniques and circled back to classic recipes. And the MarTEAni is a signature drink at a bar that is seen as a paragon of the new cocktailians.
Serving raw eggs in drinks is, thankfully, not illegal. You just have to tell customers that the drink contains them. A simple note on the menu serves as adequate warning. Unless a customer orders without looking at the menu:
The inspector reported that the customer who asked for the MarTEAni didn’t order it from the menu and that the bartender didn’t mention raw eggs were in it. But the bartender on the night of the inspection, Kenta Goto, said that no MarTEAnis were served while the inspector was present. The inspector who signed the violation sheet, Nathalie Louissaint, could not be reached for comment.
This puts a ridiculous burden on bartenders. How is one supposed to know if a customer has looked at the menu? If a regular comes in and orders the drink, must one warn him of the eggs every time in case a city inspector is watching? Rather than take these chances Pegu Club has taken the drink off the list, a loss to craft cocktail drinkers in the city.
As with many food dishes, raw eggs play an important role in giving cocktails texture. Sensitive buyers should beware and avoid egg drinks if they’re worried, just as they would avoid housemade mayonnaise or other products. For the rest of us a simple menu disclaimer should suffice.
If you’d like to try the drink in question, the recipe is here. Be sure to warn yourself about the raw egg before proceeding.
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New York City’s paternalist in chief, Michael Bloomberg, has announced that his city will now require restaurants to prominently post their safety inspection grades. Mary Cheh has introduced a similar bill in DC. On the surface it seems like a good idea. Here’s a writer at Slashfood, for example, a site not exactly known for its critical thinking about regulation:
So will this work? When Los Angeles County enacted the letter grading system back in 1998, only 40 percent of its restaurants received “A” grades. By 2006, 83 percent were meeting the standard. I have faith — it will take some time, but restaurants and consumers alike will benefit.
LA’s results are likely true, but it confuses the measurement with what we’re trying to measure. What we should care about is actual food safety, not the letter grades restaurants are receiving. If the grades aren’t highly correlated with preventing customers from getting sick, then restaurants are just wasting time and money to comply with arcane regulations and to create the illusion of safety.
Jessica at Crispy on the Outside looked up some her favorite places:
I actually read the health department reports and find that most of my favorite awesome restaurants have some infraction, usually that there is no “food manager” at the restaurant when the food police show up, which would get them a “C”.
Is having a “food manager” on duty during all business hours a cost effective way to improve outcomes? Maybe, maybe not. We do know that it drives up expenses for restaurants and training time for employees. Before we give restaurants a scarlet letter for violating this rule, we might want to find out if it actually accomplishes anything. And that’s just one rule of many.
Marc Fisher notes at the Post that proposed system relies too heavily on city inspectors:
[...] a fair and useful system would depend more on transparency than on the blunt instrument of letter grades that may not represent anything more than the misdeeds of a single vindictive, corrupt or incompetent inspector. Is there a D.C. resident who cannot imagine that their city might be home to such an inspector?
Add bribes to the higher costs of business a letter grade system might impose on DC restaurants.
The irony of this regulation and related laws about posting nutritional data is that they’re coming at a time when information technology makes them less necessary than ever. We’re not far off from the time when GPS-enabled internet phones will tell you everything you’d like to know about a restaurant as you pause in front of its window. Cities should focus on making their inspection data readily available electronically; the usefulness, if any, of current measures is limited to a few years before technology will render it obsolete.
Lastly, the nannies behind this law have no sense of aesthetics. I’ve eaten at dives and I’ve eaten at high-end establishments. When I went for banh mi in the Virginia suburbs and watched my friend flick a roach of his wrist while we waited for our sandwiches, I knew what I was getting into. (Our lunch was delicious, by the way.) Similarly, when I go out for an expensive dinner at a nice restaurant, I trust the chef not to send me home sick. Pasting a tacky city inspection certificate in the window just detracts from the experience.
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I’ve been meaning to write about NAIS, the National Animal Identification System, for a while now. The program tracks farm animals from birth to death, supposedly making it easier to identify the origin of disease outbreaks. It sounds like a good idea (and for large farms it probably is), but it has its problems. The first is that it doesn’t necessarily do much for stopping contamination that happens in a slaughterhouse. The larger concern, though, is its impact on small farmers. NAIS requires the registration and tracking of individual animals, but it makes an exception for groups of animals that spend their entire lives together and are kept isolated from other animals. Thus a factory farm could use just one registration and apply it to a massive group of cooped up chickens. A smaller farm that lets its livestock intermingle would have to register each animal individually (not to mention the practical difficulties of getting a tag on a chicken).
Participation in NAIS is generally voluntary, but smaller farmers are understandably worried about the compliance costs that could be forced on them if new food safety regulations are passed. A coalition of groups expressed their concerns to relevant congressional committees yesterday. That letter is available here.
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Paul Krugman makes another foray into the food safety issue today. His logic of blaming free market advocates for the failures of a regulatory agency is completely absurd — especially since the regulatory captures he notes in the article are exactly the kinds of things that make libertarians skeptical of government regulation in the first place.
Moreover, it’s not clear that the food safety crisis Krugman writes about has even occurred. News reports about food safety issues are certainly prominent, but according to Alex Tabarrok, the numbers tell a different story. The CDC’s data on foodborne disease outbreaks show a decline from 1998-2006.
Krugman’s previous column on food safety was covered here. Sadly, the intervening year hasn’t made him a better writer.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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