gordonzola | That food will try and kill you

"How many hamburgers have poo poo in them?"

It was early in the morning. We were in Daly City even though most of us were coming from San Francisco to take this Food Safety Manager Certification class and test. We were in some kind of city/industrial park/retirement community/public ball field thing like they have down there. It was all cinderblock and metal chairs. As a group, we were under-caffeinated.

"Poo poo" made us stir a little as it was undoubtedly intended too. The teacher asked if anyone knew the correct cooking temperature for ground beef. Someone roused themselves to answer, "155 degrees for 15 seconds". The answer was right there in our copied booklets. He threw a mini Snickers bar to her as a reward for answering and almost beaned her in the head since it was the first question of the day and no one knew the teacher would be throwing things at us.

I thought there would be an incident before the class even started when an early 20s guy delivered a clipboard to the one "hot" girl in the class, i.e. the one woman who was in her early 20s and wearing stylish clothes. I couldn’t tell by context if he knew her or was just trying to impress her. About five minutes later another woman returned to the room starts yelling, "Someone stole my clipboard! Where’s my clipboard? And my pen. And my (blank sheet of) paper. Who took it?" No one admitted anything. I mean, I would have said something if it had been something of value but since these things were all provided by the Department of Public Health for the event, I didn’t really see the point. The teacher found her some new supplies and we all started watching the slides projected on the duct taped bed sheet by the state-of-the-art 1984 overhead projector.

The State of California requires that any establishment that prepares food must have one person on staff with a Food Safety Manager Certification. Our old one is expiring this year and I drew the short straw. I didn’t really mind. I haven’t taken a standardized test in, uh, two decades, so it was kind of a retro thing for me. The funny thing is that so little of it applies to me or our store. We don’t carry meat or make prepared food which is about 95% of the exam. And at cheese conferences I’ve gone to more than one workshop on developing HACCP programsby dairy scientists so I’m pretty familiar with all the food borne pathogens and their dangerous ways.

I don’t wanna say it was a waste of time. I learned a lot, just not about my work. California actually has some of the loosest standards for food prep workers in the country. As I mentioned before the cheese conference, in Oregon anyone touching food needs a license. My Texas co-worker talked about a grueling ordeal of a week’s worth of boring classes. Here; four hours and I should get a certificate in the mail next week.

The only mention of cheese, besides which pathogens like it, was in the section about when to refuse a delivery for health reasons. Under "Acceptable Dairy" it read "Cheese: Uniform color, no mold". I can think of a number of cheeses accept every week that don’t follow that literal definition, but the class was clearly lowest common denominator. To his credit, the teacher, employed by the DPH, gave out his phone number to discuss workplace specific issues if we had any questions about our set ups.

And I really did like the guy. He used words like "poo poo" and "fecal smear" to keep us awake but didn’t ham up the E-Coli outbreak which I had expected. He also gave us great statistics like that according to a national survey 75% of men and 55% of women don’t wash their hands when leaving the bathroom. When someone tried to probe deeper into that statistic he said something like, "That’s a little philosophical for this class" and moved us right along.

In fact, I liked his illustration of the dangerous temps for hazardous foods so much that I’ve reconstructed it. This includes the cross-out because the government changed the danger zone to only go up to 135 degrees instead of the old standard of 140. Isn’t the food borne pathogen trapped in the ice cube so cute you wanna take him home!