Guess Whats Coming With Dinner?
It has been estimated that because of the chemical additive allowances prescribed by the FDA, every Philadelphian annually consumes five of chemicals, additives, preservatives, dyes and disinfectants that are part and parcel of the food he eats.
The filth standards that the FDA tolerates made national headlines several months ago because of the following disclosures:
• Every loaf of bread commercially sold in the U.S. contains insect fragments of some sort.
• In a half-pound of chocolate, 150 insect fragments and 4 rodent hairs are permissible.
• In a 3 1/2-oz. jar of peanut butter, 50 insect fragments and 2 rodent hairs are allowed.
• In addition to those contamination levels, the following items are permitted to be mixed in with the food sold in Philadelphia in moderate amounts: live and dead worms mold, fruit fly eggs, vermin hair, rat urine and excreta, sand, insect larvae and common dirt.
IN CASE THE STATE OF sanitation and food purity in Philadelphia has prompted you to head for the hills, don’t seek solace in New Jersey. A Princeton ,university report has analyzed environmental safety in the Garden State and determined that 82% of all restaurants in Jersey fail to meet minimum sanitary standards.
Originally the report blasted the New Jersey State Department of Health for allowing so many restaurants to slip so far down the sanitation ladder in the first place. However, Dr. James R. Cowan, New Jersey commissioner of health, seized on the report as an opportunity to call for new, rigid State health codes that would supersede the existing and often contradictory laws and ordinances of the various Jersey municipalities.
A wing of the New Jersey Department of Health, the Consumer Health Service, has only 15 field investigators to spread throughout the entire state.
There are 15,000 licensed restaurants and food serving establishments in Jersey. Up until last June the violators were policed by local authorities in a manner that the Health Commissioner’s Office characterized as haphazard.
Of the state’s 21 counties, the eight that are heavily populated and urbanized do not even maintain their own county health inspectors. They merely rely upon the municipal inspectors from the large towns and cities.
According to the Princeton findings, this bureaucratic buck-passing has resulted in a level of sanitation throughout New Jersey that is even worse than Pennsylvania’s.
But consumers in the Garden State are scheduled for a break this month. Cowan has ordered all grocery stores and restaurants to post their health inspection records in prominent places where patrons can easily examine them. This would be the first such action anywhere in the country.
ASSISTANT DA FRED VOIGT claims that the "jungle" of unsanitary food conditions described by novelist Upton Sinclair early this century still exists throughout the country on every level of the food industry. He offers Philadelphia as a case in point to prove his contention. "If the true story were ever told about the level of sanitation in this city, more bankruptcies would be declared overnight than the courts could handle. Nobody seems to give a damn about protecting people from the food they eat or the water they drink."
Now, what shall we have for dinner?
