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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
People often ask Esmond Anderson where he goes to eat. The truth is he rarely eats out. During seven and a half years as a restaurant inspector with the New York City Department of Health, Anderson scrutinized some two thousand commercial kitchens. Five years ago, he started teaching at the city's Health Academy, in the basement of a clinic on West 100th Street. His classroom is decorated with posters detailing, in Spanish and in English, the risks posed by dented cans, leaky vacuum-sealed packages, and careless thawing. One chronicles an outbreak of botulism traced to "killer potatoes." Anderson, who is fifty-three years old, is a trim man with very little hair and an almost imperceptible gray mustache. He speaks in the accent of his native Guyana, and manages to convey a respect for the gravity of his task and, at the same time, an appreciation of its futility. He likes to tell his students--pushcart venders, sous-chefs, restaurant managers, bartenders, and short-order cooks--that he thinks of them all as potential murderers.
"The things that you're going to learn, some of them are going to shock you," he informed his class one recent afternoon. "You might say, 'I never knew this! How is it I've been preparing food and serving it all this time and no one ever died?' As a matter of fact, how do you know that your customers have never died? If they died, they don't come back to you to complain."
Anderson's weeklong course costs a hundred and five dollars. It consists of five three-hour sessions and ends in an exam that is offered in twenty languages. The take-home quizzes have questions like "People, both food workers and customers, pose the greatest risk to food safety. True or False?" and "List three situations when hands must be washed thoroughly." The week I attended, I sat in the back row. On my right was a woman from Queens who managed a Blimpie; she had already had, she acknowledged to the group, an unhappy encounter with a city health inspector. On my left was a man who operated a fleet of ice-cream trucks in the Bronx. (When I suggested that this ought to be pretty safe, he countered that, on the contrary, ice cream was a "bacteria magnet.") At a later session, one of my neighbors was a Russian man who used to work at a hair salon near the World Trade Center but was planning to get into shish kebab. He took copious notes on tiny sheets of paper, and enthusiastically yelled out the answers to all of Anderson's questions. ("Vayrmin!" he declared, more or less correctly, in response to one of them.) In front of us, a man in an Auburn University...
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