Dirty linen made public
Food writer and critic Simon Wright
How clean is your kitchen, on a scale of one to five, say? Naturally it depends on the criteria. What would warrant a score of only one, for instance? Perhaps the squalor of the kitchens I shared in my student days. And a maximum score of five? Maybe the cooking facilities in the Howard Hughes household.
It's not an easy judgement to make, but fortunately an army of experts are on their way to assist - Britain's environmental health officers (EHOs). The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health is proposing that they adopt a scoring system to indicate their opinion of the state of a kitchen's hygiene. You must then stick a piece of paper in the window of your premises so that the whole world can share their view.
On the face of it, it seems reasonable enough - if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to fear. That's a familiar enough argument and it's one often used to justify some new wave of bureaucratic intrusion, whether it be ID cards, random drug testing in the workplace, or the fanatical use of CCTV. The problem is that it's an argument that assumes saintliness on the part of those doing the checking-up and conveniently ignores the potential consequences of incompetence, mistakes, maladministration or malicious intent.
Imagine this. It's one of those days when wooden chopping boards are unacceptable (who can keep up with that one?) and you get caught in possession. Maybe as a consequence you get a score of four instead of five. Not a bad effort, but if I was the customer, I'd naturally be wondering where that missing mark had gone and whether it was loitering in my food somewhere.
None of this is to dismiss the very necessary work of the EHOs, but should this really be the way to focus their limited resources? Surely their energies need to be directed at the worst, persistent offenders (to be fair, many already do this) and let's not forget that most of the really severe food health scares have had their origins further back in the food production chain. BSE wasn't cooked up in a restaurant kitchen.
The restaurant industry is a vital part of the British economy. Increasingly, tourists from both home and abroad choose their destination on the basis of some good eating-out.
The Government needs to recognise this and grasp the realisation that running a restaurant is a tough enough business as it is. It should be looking at ways of lifting the burden, not adding to it.