OregonLive just made available what the Oregon Department of Agriculture wouldn’t: the scores of grocery store food safety inspections.
Oregonlive.com created their own searchable database of over 1000 Oregon store inspection results so you can view them, and listed the 12 worst offenders. The results may influence your future shopping habits. A random scan of results shows violations such as rodent droppings, cockroaches, improperly stored food, undated sushi, coolers not cooling properly and more. The database covers everything from major grocers such as Safeway to small ethnic grocery stores.
Speaking of Health and restaurants this week brought this odd press release:
Elevated cutlery – this one with a travertine rest.
Is your favorite restaurant serving you more than just the food you ordered? I’m talking germs — those invisible little microbes that might be multiplying all around your dinner plate. According to Dr. Charles Gerba (aka Dr. Germ) –a University of Arizona microbiologist….. odds are, the tabletop you’re using is loaded with germs — even if you just watched your server wipe it off. Why? Because, despite the fact that restaurants are required to clean tables after each use, what they clean them with is questionable. “They’re supposed to soak the sponges or cloths in disinfectant but often they don’t. So as they continue to wipe table after table, all they’re really doing is distributing more germs” says the doctor. Dr. Gerba said his team swabbed tables before and after the server wiped it down and typically found more bacteria after it was wiped than before.
Germ-Free Eating with Dining Elevated: Dining Elevated flatware rests save your forks, knives and spoons from ever having to touch the tabletop again! Dining Elevated rests literally uplift your flatware allowing them to lie on clean and super chic looking rests so that you don’t have to place flatware on the tabletop (or your napkin or plate anymore.) Hospitality brands, restaurant supply distributors, top chefs, and even home decor experts are standardizing the use of cutlery rests industry-wide. For more information please visit: https://www.diningelevated.com/ .
I suppose you could carry around your own silverware with a little stand to keep them off of the table, but the paranoia being pushed here is just silly. How about you go to restaurants you trust, where you’ve seen tables being wiped off properly. If you are worried about this, you are probably going to the wrong restaurants.
I’ve rolled my eyes so hard I may have an injury.
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oldswengsays
I worked in a grocery store in the late ’60s and we were always alerted when the inspector was active. There was an agreement among all the stores in town to warn all the other stores when the inspector showed up. When we would get “the call” all available staff went to work cleaning the produce and butcher areas of the market. Believe me, they always needed plenty of work to pass inspection.
oldsweng says
I worked in a grocery store in the late ’60s and we were always alerted when the inspector was active. There was an agreement among all the stores in town to warn all the other stores when the inspector showed up. When we would get “the call” all available staff went to work cleaning the produce and butcher areas of the market. Believe me, they always needed plenty of work to pass inspection.