Behind the kitchen door
Who's keeping Edmonton's restaurants safe

Karen Kleiss and Charles Rusnell with files from Scott Hornby
The Edmonton Journal
Sunday, October 01, 2006

EDMONTON - a south-side restaurant owner tried to stall the health inspector on a surprise visit one morning, claiming he needed to turn on the lights. But the lights were on and the inspector pressed on.

Inside, staff scurried to put away raw ducks and cooked chicken left out all night. In the filthy cooler, the inspector found raw meat uncovered and stored on the floor, and evidence of insect and vermin infestation. In the food preparation area, he found knives caked with dried food and a butcher block covered in mould. Grease and food debris covered everything. The dishwasher was broken. Garbage was stored everywhere. The cooks' uniforms were dirty, and their hygiene poor.

All this was described in the Capital Health inspector's report. But the diners who ate in the restaurant that day and in the weeks that followed never knew just how filthy it was -- and what a health risk it posed.

In many other North American cities, citizens have easy access to information about the cleanliness of the restaurants where they eat. In Toronto and at least 50 other cities across the continent, a restaurant's inspection results are posted in the front window. In Vancouver and Los Angeles, the results are posted online. In Chicago, shuttered restaurants are affixed with an enormous green sign that says the place is closed because it is dirty.

In Edmonton, Capital Health officials say there is no public demand for this crucial health information, and they have not advocated for diners to have access to it.

"If the public is interested they should have a right to find out," acknowledges Dr. Gerry Predy, chief medical officer of health for the Capital Health Region.

"But right now, we don't have people inundating us with calls. ... We haven't had the public asking us for that kind of information."

Wendy Armstrong, an Edmonton-based consumer advocate and former head of the Alberta branch of the Consumer's Association of Canada, says diners shouldn't have to ask.

"Consumers have a right to this kind of information," she says. "An open market relies on informed consumer choice."

Inspection records are public, but to see them, people have to make a freedom-of-information request and wait up to a month for Capital Health to release them. The health authority posts cleanup and closure orders on its website, but removes them after two weeks. The same orders are sent to the local media, but they do not always publish stories.

"There are a lot of people who would love to see inspection reports posted on the web or the facility," Capital Health restaurant inspector Nyall Hislop says. Unlike a cleanup order, inspection reports contain detailed information about a restaurant's cleanliness and safety, positive and negative.

A nine-year veteran, Hislop has taken more dirty restaurants to court than any other inspector at Capital Health.

"Can you imagine how powerful that would be for a bad place? All of a sudden it is transparent, everyone can see it, it is not just between the health department and them anymore.

"It is a very powerful tool."

Alberta's Auditor General Fred Dunn agrees. In a report obtained by The Journal to be released Monday, he says "regional health authorities should consider a wider range of tools to promote and enforce food safety.

"Inspection is not just detective in nature; it also has preventative and educational aspects."

In his report, Dunn highlights the success of Toronto's DineSafe program, implemented in 2001.

One component of that program is disclosure. Customers can see the results of any restaurant's most recent inspection on a coloured sign in the window -- green for pass, yellow for conditional pass and red for those that fail.

Dunn notes that Toronto credits the program with a 200-per-cent jump in the number of restaurants that pass their first inspection.

Toronto's Healthy Environments director Ron deBurger says it has also been extremely popular with the public.

Ninety-eight cent of Torontonians support it, he says, and 95 per cent say they choose a place to eat based on the posted inspection results.

"People can make an informed decision as to whether or not they want to go in," deBurger says. "The restaurants are cleaner, and as a result the conditions are far better for the customers."

Inspection statistics from a similar program in Los Angeles also show disclosure leads to cleaner restaurants. When that program was first implemented in 1998, 57 per cent of restaurants obtained an "A" grade. By 2005, that number had grown to 84 per cent.

The grading program also lowered the number of food-borne illnesses in that city by more than 13 per cent, according to a 2005 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health.

Not only are restaurants cleaner and consumers healthier, the cleanest establishments are making more money.

Two economists working at Stanford and Maryland universities say restaurants that earn an "A" grade in Los Angeles see their revenue grow by nearly six per cent because the public knows they are clean. By contrast, "B" grade restaurants earn less than one per cent more each year and "C" grade restaurants lose one per cent of business when the grades are published.

"Consumers have a preference for high hygiene," authors Ginger Jin and Phillip Leslie wrote in the 2001 study.

"The introduction of the hygiene grade cards provides an incentive for firms to improve their hygiene quality."

A Toronto survey of restaurant owners reinforces that finding: it found three in four restaurateurs support the public disclosure system -- and that they fear the red closure signs and even the yellow conditional pass signs because both bring a loss in business.

The economists note, however, that if there is no public grading system, changes in kitchen cleanliness -- for better or for worse -- don't change the bottom line.

Some Edmonton restaurants spend thousands of dollars every year on supplies and staff to meet Capital Health standards and keep their restaurants pristine, but get no recognition.

Darin Pattengale, who oversees the restaurant inspection disclosure system in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says it is these vigilant restaurateurs who support tough inspectors and full disclosure.

"The restaurant owners and managers, the good ones and the big chains, all realize that we are an asset to them," he says.

So if a disclosure system helps make restaurants cleaner, keeps diners healthier, boosts the bottom line for the safest restaurants and is backed by local inspectors, why hasn't Capital Health adopted one?

"Capital Health would say that transparency is a great thing," says Bill Hohn, head of the capital region's restaurant inspection program.

"It's just the regulation is silent on how much transparency there should be."

Alberta's Food Regulation, which falls under the province's Public Health Act, doesn't specifically instruct regional health authorities to make inspection records public, so Capital Health hasn't done so. Neither has any other health authority in Alberta.

Health Minister Iris Evans, who administers the legislation, declined repeated requests for an interview.

Capital Health could implement a disclosure system even in the absence of provincial regulations, but Hohn says "we are not going to move to something independently of all Alberta."

He says the health authority has reviewed the possibility and -- though there has been no cost-benefit analysis or internal report -- he believes the cost would be prohibitive. It would also be unfair for capital region residents to be the only diners in the province to benefit from such transparency, he says.

Hohn also questions the value of publicizing inspection reports because they are only a snapshot in time.

"Remember, we were only there the day we were there," he says.
"So, you are asking for information that could be six or eight months old. What is the validity of that information?"

But some question this logic.

"If inspections were only a snapshot, then what was the value of the inspection before we did grading?" asks Terrance Powell, chief environmental health specialist for the Los Angeles County inspection system.

"Inspections are not necessarily a snapshot. I think what inspections capture extremely well is poor habits and trends.

"We consider our grades to be a tool for the consumer to make an informed choice, which is to say that an objective third party went in and looked at food safety, facility hygiene, and they have made an assessment."

Capital Health, meanwhile, questions whether disclosure initiatives work at all. Predy says a review of the scientific literature found no objective evidence that public disclosure improves restaurant food safety.

"If there was a benefit to doing it, certainly we would look at it. But we have not been able to identify the benefit,"he says.

"If we were going to do it, we would have to have some good evidence that in fact it was effective, or in fact that the public was really asking for it"

With files from Scott Hornby
kkleiss@thejournal.canwest.com
crusnell@thejournal.canwest.com

IS YOUR FAVOURITE EATERY CLEAN?
How clean and safe is your favourite restaurant?

The Journal fought for more than a year to obtain the Capital Health database that contains the inspection records for thousands of restaurants throughout the region. It is your information: it is collected on behalf of the public and paid for with taxpayer dollars.
For the first time, The Journal is making it available to our readers. Check out edmontonjournal.com to see how your favourite restaurant fared during recent inspections.
If you want detailed restaurant inspection records, you can submit a freedom of information request to Capital Health -- but you will have to pay $25 and wait up to 30 days for the inspection file.

Using Alberta's freedom of information laws, Journal reporters Karen Kleiss and Charles Rusnell gained unprecedented access to nearly 100,000 inspection records from Capital Health. They found numerous stomach-churning violations and an inspection system that fails to enforce safety standards, many of which are highlighted in this three-part series.

© The Edmonton Journal 2006