Recently I had to earn a City of Austin Food Handler’s certificate. I’m not going to go too much into how little I think of that program. It seems to be both futile, considering that foodservice is an industry with more off-the-books labor than la contruction, and cruel considering how few of the foodservice employees have access to the "convenient" online course, or the literacy and test-taking skills to pass it if they did.
Basically it seems like another way for the city council to dick around with people who are too poor to matter, unlike the developers the city government is always kissing up to. We can add it to the list, along with the under-18 bike helmet rule (a way for cops to dick with poor black kids on bicycles), the no unsupervised leash law (a way to impose white middle-class PETA values on the non-whites/non-vegetarians on the East Side), and the no-smoking ordinance (a way for people who don’t go to bars to make bars less fun for the people who are actually enjoying their life, as well as protecting the three bartenders in the Austin area who don’t smoke themselves).
See, I hardly got into that at all.
What I really wanted to get into, was the "convenient" online course. Aside from the entertaining emphasis on the "fecal-hands-mouth vector", it also had a unit on bioterrorism and how the foodservice industry can protect itself.
They made me watch an instructional video produced by the City of Fort Worth bioterrorism department.
I wasn’t able to find the actual video online (no doubt because they don’t want it falling into the wrong hands), but here’s some of the anti-terrorism guidelines it provides to those of us in foodservice:
*Regularly check all the lockers and storage areas in the facility for suspicious packages.
*Create an emergency response team to develop an ACTION PLAN in case of sabotage or other emergencies.
*Test your plan to identify any adjustments that might be needed.
Needless to say, there is not a foodservice establishment in the history of the universe who will ever bother doing any of this. We’ve had fires, power-outages, severe burns, and a man who died in the process of making the day’s muffins. Why would we spend hours a week on something that has less chance of happening than a tornado carrying the bakery to Oz?
Will there ever come a time when America isn’t filled with a bunch of hysterical pricks?
