When it comes to your safety, does the county or city where you dine make a difference? It's the question we're trying to answer in an ABC2 News Investigation, finding out how often checks are made on the places that serve you. Investigator Joce Sterman broke down hundreds of restaurant reports to find the answer.
Week after week, we've taken you into restaurants around the region, inviting ourselves into their kitchens to show you what's really happening inside. But now we're going one step further, digging in to get the dirt on how often the eateries you enjoy are actually examined and if they deserve an "A" for their efforts. The reason for our efforts?? Caroline Smith DeWall with the Center for Science in the Public Interest says, "Today, the public really doesn't know how often restaurants are being inspected."
But we think that’s something you should know, so we're putting hundreds of restaurant inspection reports to work for you. Our goal is to give you a report card on the health department where you live. To do that we picked 100 restaurants at random from each of the four jurisdictions we've already covered in our Dirty Dining series. We pulled two years worth of records for each one and went through thousands of inspection reports to see who's doing a good job of protecting your health.
And what we found is that’s a tough question to answer. Here’s what we found. Harford and Anne Arundel counties came out on top when it came to total inspections. Inspectors in those two counties each made 677 visits over the two-year period we checked. On average, that means their restaurants got 3.4 inspections a year, more than what's required by Maryland's food code. But our investigation revealed the two jurisdictions with the most restaurants fell below those state requirements. Baltimore City's dining spots got a total of 431 visits during the two-year span. That’s an average of 2.1 inspections per year. Baltimore County was even lower with a total of 371 visits, an average of 1.85 visits per year.
On the flipside, the county and city had more restaurant closures. Baltimore County had a total of 19 closures within the records we checked. Baltimore City had 12 closures while Anne Arundel County had two and Harford County had none. And that got us wondering, does the difference mean one area is safer than another?
We decided to ask Alan Taylor, the director of the state’s Office of Food Protection. He says, “No, I don't want to say that because you have to look at each individual inspection and each individual violation in each inspection.” We took our findings to Taylor to get a better understanding of why health departments ultimately governed by the same food code could have such different results. He says the state health department does all it can to standardize the inspection process by training local inspectors to follow state guidelines. But in the end, jurisdictions have to develop their own protocols because some have more stringent codes and their inspectors often have different responsibilities. In some jurisdictions inspectors handle everything from restaurant inspections to housing and sewer issues. Taylor tells ABC2, "The mere fact is that you have different people doing the same thing. They're not robots, they're not machines. We're trying to make sure that everybody looks at the same things all the time."
And in Maryland, that means monitoring every restaurant for critical control points. Those points include monitoring things like food temperature and potential contamination to make sure problems are recorded and corrected. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest doesn’t believe that’s enough. Caroline Smith DeWall says, "It's critically important that there be more public accountability in this process."
The CSPI has done a dirty dining study of its own, determining there's a need for restaurant grades that give you the information you need right at the door, instead of sending you searching. The group feels letter grades can have a real impact on restaurant food safety. They point to success in Los Angeles, where the addition of a grading system resulted in a drop in emergency room visits related to food borne illness. DeWall Smith says, "It means restaurants can't just get by with an inspection that will keep them open. They're going to strive to have the very best inspection and get an A."
But as our investigation uncovered, making the grade when it comes to those inspections depends on a lot of factors. Still, outbreak numbers are low and state officials say that's the real sign of results. Taylor says, "When you think about the millions of meals served every day in this state and how many people don't get sick. It's amazing."
