Video: Chicago inspectors trash food at new kitchen
Maybe it’s because I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. But I could hardly believe my eyes this afternoon as I videotaped Chicago health inspectors throwing out about 200 servings of fine-looking beef ravioli at a state-of-the-art kitchen in West Town. About a minute and a half in to the tape, check out how fast they dumped the fresh salad that was supposed to go with the ravioli.
Since Thursday, the inspectors have trashed hundreds of pounds of food at Kitchen Chicago, a facility shared by 11 small businesses, including caterers, candymakers and artisan bakers.
Frances Guichard, food protection director at the Chicago Department of Public Health, says the city found no unsanitary conditions. Guichard says many of the businesses, rather, hadn’t labeled their storage areas and lacked receipts for some of the ingredients. None of the tenants, she adds, had received a city license to prepare food for the public.
The kitchen’s owner, Alexis Leverenz, does have a license and says the city told her the tenants could operate under it. Some of her renters, for their part, insist the city told them it couldn’t issue multiple licenses to a single address.
Now the tenants have lost food worth thousands of dollars. They’re worried about losing clients too. And the city has slapped Leverenz with three citations that could lead to fines and tougher enforcement. “It’s ridiculous,” Leverenz told me as the inspectors filled her garbage bins with food. “What purpose does this serve?”
Plenty, responds Guichard, who calls the paperwork vital for keeping tabs on the food’s transport, preparation and storage. “If someone gets sick, you can track it back to the source,” she says.
At least one of Chicago’s neighbors cuts through some of the red tape. Carl Caneva, who manages environmental health for Evanston, says that city allows its sole shared kitchen, Now We’re Cookin’, to operate under a single license.
Find an extended audio version of this story at chicagopublicradio.org.
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02 2010
blogs.vocalo.org
Again?
Maybe all of Chicago’s foodies should organize a massive demonstration or something to help out these small businesses.
I’d be down with helping make that happen. LTH should lead the charge…
This speaks to the larger issue of excessive food waste at restaurants and grocery stores. Rightly they must daily toss food that is essentially fit for consumption to meet health standards. But often it’s done merely in the interest of keeping tomatoes and beef looking rosy red and bread smelling “just baked” fresh.
This is hard to justify when so many are hungry.
it’s hard to watch, but it’s an evil necessity. what happens if someone becomes ill? there is no way to track the food and find out what ingredients could be the culprit. any restaurant worth its salt wont even let a person bring a home-made birthday cake, much less use those standards in their own kitchen.
I find this whole episode very upsetting. I’ve been to Kitchen Chicago, in part because I was planning to start my own small business, which requires a minimal amount of food processing, and I’m required to do that in a licensed kitchen.
Kitchen Chicago are very professional, the facility is very clean, beautifully organized, brand-new, and they have good guidelines for their renters to follow.
Anyone who thinks it’s an “evil necessity” to destroy perfectly good food when so many are going hungry ought to go look themselves long and hard in the mirror. And go without dinner for a day or two.
I, personally, am rethinking my business plans, since the hoops new small businesses have to jump through are really just too many, and the up-front cost and risk too high, especially when one only has one’s own savings to invest, since the banks aren’t lending.
It is disturbing to see such waste. However, you are overlooking the public risk that comes into play with some of thier practices. I think they are a very fine establishment and it makes my heart ache to see so much food dumped in the waste bin. But food safety laws are there for our protection. It is a risk to have unlabled and untraceable food items. Surely you can acknowledge this.
Their only “practice” was to offer one single licence for everyone to operate under. This is done successfully in many other places, Evanston being one. Chicago was perfectly willing to do this also, apparently, until they discovered the vast city budget deficit, sometime last year.
Kitchen Chicago have never evaded an inspection, and they do not allow unsanitary practices. Everything is monitored.
If the inspectors were offended by a missing purchase receipt, they could easily have cited that, and not destroyed all the food.
Small producers, particularly organic producers, have to go through multiple regulatory hoops to gain organic ertification. This notion that every renter has to have their own licence to use the premises is nothing more than gouging by the licence department, and the idea that everyone should be responsible for the lapse of one, absurd.
If you are truly concerned about food traceability, you should be focusing on the fast food chains, who buy food from factory farms where the living conditions are unspeakable, and the butchery practices horrific, and really don’t care a whit about reputation, since they can afford to spend a gazillion dollars on PR, if something goes wrong, and not the small, independent artisan whose entire reputation and livelihood rests on producing good, quality products, and, for whom, one event such as this destroys their livelihood alogether.