IN PRAISE OF FAST FOOD
It turns out big restaurant chains are less likely to make you seriously sick,
Donald Trump is known to eat lots of fast food: McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken rank among his favourites. But the new U.S. president doesn’t just like the taste of Quarter Pounders and Fish Delights — he has also said that he believes chain establishments are safer.
Speaking at a Republican town hall last year, Trump praised Wendy’s and McDonald’s for maintaining what he called “a certain standard”: “I like cleanliness,” he said, “and I think you’re better off going there than maybe some place that you have no idea where the food is coming from.”
He’s right. Chain restaurants do often demonstrate better food safety practices than their non-chain competition. And that’s important, given the number of people who come down with food-borne illnesses each year: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts the figure at 48 million.
This is not a universal rule, of course. Your corner dive could follow food-safety protocol to the letter, and your local Starbucks could be a dump. But generally speaking, public health experts have found, major corporate chains have consolidated and standardized their food prep operations in a way that cuts down on possible contamination.
“Chains are worried about their corporate reputations. They have a lot to lose,” said Donald Schaffner, an extension specialist in food science at Rutgers University.
“It’s not that mom-and-pop places don’t have a lot to lose, but they may lack that corporate infrastructure to make sure their food is safe.”
A 2013 poll of restaurant managers in eight states, conducted by a division of the CDC, found that chain restaurants were more likely to check the temperature of hamburgers and to have a certified food manager on staff, both measures that can stem the spread of pathogens such as E. coli and norovirus. When the CDC surveyed managers and workers in six states a year later, they found that the managers of chain restaurants and large restaurants were much more likely to pass a basic food safety test.
Just last week, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published an analysis of two years of health inspection data from Philadelphia area restaurants, looking for patterns among the restaurants that flunked. Their conclusion?
“Health departments and city inspection officials could use these findings to focus their efforts on non-chain restaurants” — which saw 9.6 total violations per inspection, versus 6.5 in their chain counterparts.
The chain advantage begins with suppliers, said Juelene Beck, a former vicepresident at Burger King who now works as a consultant. Because chain restau- rants frequently comprise a supplier’s entire business, they have an unusual degree of control over how their products are sourced and handled. In the past 10 years, Beck said, most national chains have hired third-party food safety consultants to conduct random audits of the facilities that supply burgers, buns and other ingredients to their establishments.
That’s significant, since many outbreaks originate in the supply chain: the great Taco Bell E. coli outbreak of 2006 was traced to shredded lettuce.
Chains have also centralized more prep in these facilities — the better to minimize employee error at the point of sale. Fresh produce is frequently not chopped at the franchise location, but at a central facility where it can be tested for microbes, for instance.
And many chains cook burgers and other foods from frozen, which is basically a means of making sure beef doesn’t sit at unsafe temperatures. At McDonald’s, the grill tops won’t release until a burger has been on the heat for a certain number of minutes.
“They’ve engineered human frailty out of the system,” Schaffner said.
But food safety advocates point out that mistakes still happen — either because not every company adheres to equally high standards, or because it’s next to impossible to guarantee compliance across hundreds of suppliers and thousands of employees. And when mistakes do happen, the size of the chain and the concentration of its suppliers can make the results deadly.
“There are too many exceptions that prove the rule,” said Marion Nestle, an expert on nutrition and food safety, in an email to the Washington Post.
“The issues in restaurant food safety are ensuring a safe supply chain, following basic food safety rules (hot foods hot, cold foods cold, no cross contamination, etc.), and keeping employees healthy and washing their hands. Violations of those principles can occur anywhere, and do.”