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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

No not neat.

My cousin is a restaurant inspector and the horror stories she has told even for professional kitchens is unbelievable. The apathy and greed of some is going to kill people some day.

Rice is one of the worst foods. Your choice is to keep it super hot or in a flat tray and chilled. There's a natural bacteria that grows if the rice is in a bowel and isn't hot anymore. I looked it up: bacillus cereus.

Soap is another it's incredible how many kitchens have no soap. The inspector arrives and then there is a scramble to find some soap. But it makes you think how many people had a crap and just went back to work without washing their hands with soap.

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Like it or not, people are eating mass amounts of home-cooked zero-inspection food every day. Letting a little bit of that get sold for profit isn't a major risk.

> Rice is one of the worst foods. Your choice is to keep it super hot or in a flat tray and chilled.

These laws generally apply to shelf-stable foods. So not rice.

> Soap is another it's incredible how many kitchens have no soap. The inspector arrives and then there is a scramble to find some soap. But it makes you think how many people had a crap and just went back to work without washing their hands with soap.

Isn't that the exact kind of problem that would be less likely in a home environment?

> Letting a little bit of that get sold for profit isn't a major risk.

This sounds exactly like the sort of thing where statistics are how you get an answer. And, googling a bit, there's answers. Or at least details.

At some point, all food was like this, and AFAIK that day was at least as recent as the 1800s. Right? I wonder when the first time a "food inspector" (in the modern sense) was a thing.

It’s much older than that, food standards go way back. England’s rather famous Assize of Bread and Ale regulating quality dates to 1266. There is likely thousands of years of history around bakers or brewers trying to save money and laws or customs designed to regulate it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Bread_and_Ale

That said, the knowledge of pathogens is relatively recent ~1670s which ended up changing many rules. Historically food safety was a major issue that killed a lot of people. But, it’s not really something most people know much about.

> At some point, all food was like this

At some point all food was uninspected. But this isn't about all food. Those numbers are useless. This is generally about shelf-stable goods sold in small amounts. The sales are limited in two different major ways.

> the rice is in a bowel

bowel?

May be he meant bowl.

That's also my assumption as it makes a lot of sense, basically what they're saying is "wet" warm rice is a breeding ground for bacteria.

Though reading wiki for B. cereus it doesn't seem like an issue for "fresh" rice but rather when rice is cooked, improperly refrigerated (aka not refrigerated immediately), then just warmed over: this allows spores to germinate, grow and produce toxins which are difficult to destroy (wiki quotes 56C for 5mn to destroy enterotoxins but 121C for 90mn for emetic toxins).

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