[texas booster]

>I?The food safety report filed that day graded Mi Cocina at 60 points out of 100. The details weren’t pretty. Flies in the kitchen. No hot water for washing dishes. Cooked chicken sitting out at room temperature. Another problem for the restaurant: “toxics stored with food and toxic spray bottle used on food.”

Sorry but these are pretty serious code violations. While only a snapshot in time, if kitchen staff doesn't know how to maintain cooked food before serving, and if the kitchen manager doesn't even boil water for hand washing dishes; all are signs of very poor training and enforcement by the restaurant management.

These are really bad sanitation practices. People can and will get very sick from kitchens as poorly managed as this. Overall I really like Mi Cocina but their sanitation practices point to poor hiring practices.

If a full serve, expensive restaurant can't be bothered to understand sanitation then they should be shut down.

I needed a health card when I worked in a restaurant, which is an admittedly weak form of inspection. But TB and Hep A B C can kill.

AFAIK all health cards were dropped once AIDS carriers became a protected class.

[bgill]

Here, outside of Austin, I haven’t heard of anyone needing a health card. Food workers come and go like a revolving door.

[IronJack]

I understand peoples' fear of "unsanitary" food service practices. But a lot of those fears are overblown, paranoid even. And governments capitalize on those paranoias by pretending to safeguard against the dangers.

As we've seen here, the watchdogs don't really do their jobs, or at least do them inconsistently. Yet no adverse effects materialize. So how useful are the watchdogs in the first place, aside from making people believe they're safer? (And stealing taxpayer money, bribes, and power).