RE: kitchen inspectors
From: Rob Sandelin (robsanmicrosoft.com)
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 94 16:27 CST
John Eaton wrote:

>You do need to meet and exceed all health requirements. If several
>of your group come down with E coli then you will be up the creek
>without the paddle. If you do not let the county in then you better
>maintain your own standards that will asure that nobody gets sick.
>One big advantage with having an inspected kitchen is that you can
>prepare food for resale. A lot of homemakers try to start cook at
>home businesses only to be shut down because they do not have a
>properly inspected kitchen.


As part of our insurance overview we specifically looked at liabilites 
from food preparation.  We are covered for a million bucks for any 
lawsuits resulting from  illness or even death from any cause, 
including community dinner.

We have had one food illness, probably salmonella from some shrimp 
which made a couple people ill.  It was a good warning for us and we 
haven't done shrimp of that type again (Large shrimp need to be deep 
fried in order to get enough heat into the interior body cavity I 
guess. We were WOK cooking them).

Chicken is notorious for being packages of salmonella.  They did a 
recent check of 120 samples from 15 Seattle stores. Guess what? EVERY 
SINGLE ONE was contaminated with Salmonella and another critter which I 
forget what it was called but is nasty for pregnant women.

We eat chicken at least once a week without illness.  Our dishwasher is 
a residential model too and I don't think we are any more careful about 
cooking community dinner than a typical home  is.  Either we are really 
hardy, lucky, or the whole food safety issue is overblown.  I suspect 
it is the latter.  The enourmous hassle and cost of food handling 
permits, monthly inspections, OSHA safety requirements, etc.  are not 
worth allowing someone to run commercial cooking out of the 
commonhouse.  I know of a community which runs a school and they spend 
a huge amount of money and time dealing with kitchen inspection issues. 
 They may end up closing down the school because they can't maintain 
the costs for what has been demanded for their kitchen.  They have run 
a community kitchen for 15 years without incident and don't even have a 
dishwasher!

Rob Sandelin
Still alive after all those hamburgers







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