Close them down
We have been too tolerant for too long so much so owners are becoming too audacious
IT has happened again. In the most recent case two people have died eating laksa from a stall. Another 81 are down with food poisoning. This is a story we read about in the newspapers every now then. Only the details vary. But these unhygienic practices are not limited to hawker food. Restaurants and other eateries, too, are known to send their clients to hospitals. And occasionally to the grave too. Dirt doesn't disturb them. Neither do deaths. We can still recall a banana leaf restaurant in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur where workers were caught on video washing plates with water from potholes at the backlane of the outlet. Thanks to social media, everyone from Kangar to Keningau, knew about the dirty goings-on of the eatery. It was rightly ordered closed by the authorities. There have been far too many temporary closures throughout the country. After a fortnight, they are up and about like nothing had happened. Some of them go back to their dirty old ways. We seem to be giving them the wrong message.
The authorities, too, seem to succumb to old habits: they let off the offending outlets too easily. Sometimes with just a compound of RM1,000. This is akin to allowing the unhygienic eateries to buy their way out of dirty habits. It is not that we do not have laws. Malaysia has enough of them. Take the case of the Food Act 1983. It has provisions that can cost the owner RM100,000 in fines and even put him behind bars for a maximum of 10 years. Despite deaths over the years due to food poisoning, we do not hear of restaurateurs doing time in prison for that long, if they are imprisoned at all. But we cannot put all the blame on the law alone. The local authorities must also do things that local authorities are set up to do. There is clearly a systemic problem here. Eateries keep employing foreign workers with unhygienic habits. Many of the foreign food handlers are not vaccinated either. We know this from the Bangsar banana leaf restaurant case. The are some 250,000 legal foreign workers employed in eateries throughout the country. Unvaccinated, the food handlers pass the diseases they bring with them to the customers. Some are even resistant to antibiotics. It is time for the government to dive deep into this systemic problem. What is needed is an all-encompassing food management system from shovel to fork that covers food producers through chefs to food handlers.
Customers, too, must play their role. We must stay away from dirty eateries. Customers have the power to kill off unhygienic eateries by staying away from them. Each time we eat at such dirty outlets, we not only put our lives in danger but also send a wrong signal to the owners. Being dirty is okay, we seem to be saying. We must become more litigious too. The law gives us an avenue to sue the owner in such an event. It will be unwise not to make use of it. Pain must at times come with payment.
Customers have the power to kill off unhygienic eateries by staying away from them.