Would you eat here?
A good idea that in practice is deeply flawed? Somerset Confidential® investigates the food hygiene rating scheme....
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Would you eat here?
You are in a new town, you don’t know the area and you need somewhere to eat. How do you go about finding something suitable? Personal preference for different types of food of course. Pizza or curry? Thai rather than Chinese or maybe Vietnamese instead? Bistro or a chippy? Kebabs or bratwurst?
Many towns these days offer a myriad of choices. But is food style and type the only consideration? Surely what most people would like to know is that the food is carefully prepared in a safe environment and cooked properly. In short you don’t want E-Coli, Salmonella or food poisoning.
But food safety isn’t always visible. Many kitchens are hidden away behind closed doors. The food may be well cooked but has it been safely stored? Has raw meat been kept safely in the fridge, have vegetables developed the sort of furry coat usually reserved for peaches? What about rats or cockroaches?
The whole world of food hygiene is (or at least should be) important to us when we are eating out. And there is a guardian of food safety. It comes in the guise of the Food Hygiene Inspection regime run by your local authority. In some areas it is run by the district council, in Somerset it is our unitary Somerset Council.
Somerset Council’s food hygiene team have the job of inspecting all the premises in the council area that prepare food. And rate them from zero to five. By the way, for clarity, zero is not a good thing!
In fact where premises are graded zero “urgent improvement is required”. Where premises are graded one than “major improvement is required”. Grading then runs up to five (hygiene standards are very good).
What does a zero hygiene rating mean? When a food safety officer inspects a business, it is to check that it meets the requirements of food hygiene law. At the inspection, the officer will check:
how hygienically the food is handled, how it is prepared, cooked, re-heated, cooled and stored
the condition of the structure of the buildings, the cleanliness, layout, lighting, ventilation
how the business manages what it does to make sure food is safe (and demonstrate to the officer that he/she can be confident the standards will be maintained in the future)
Each of these three elements is essential to ensure that food hygiene standards meet basic requirements, and that the food that is served or sold to you, is safe to eat. To get a zero overall means there are things that have gone wrong in any or all of these categories and need urgent attention.
So far so good. But how often are food premises inspected and how easy is it to know how an establishment preparing your food has been rated? And do the inspections and ratings actually give us the sense of comfort that they should do?
The first thing to say, and this may come as a surprise, is that Somerset Council has more food businesses in its patch that prepare food than any other local authority in the south west.