Guess What’s Coming With Dinner?


Randy Hirschhorn, a 23-year-old environmentalist from Rutgers University, exemplifies the new breed of investigators who consider their fight for pure food and sanitation more of a crusade than a job.

By night Hirschhorn is a master’s degree candidate in public health administration. By day he prowls the kitchens, back rooms and alleys of Philadelphia, intent upon nipping disease and food-related epidemics in the bud.

He came to Philadelphia from Camden where he was a kind of consulting engineer who evaluated that city’s environmental headaches, Like most of the new sanitarians, he entered the service starry-eyed, fresh from the womb of campus idealism, but it didn’t take him long to get street-smart.

"Four days after my training was over, they took me by the hand and said: ‘Go forth, young man, and inspect.’" His first assignment was a lunchroom on South 15th Street in center city.

"It looked pretty clean. I couldn’t see what the kitchen was like, but the hostess was spotless. I walked over to the counter and saw a delicious-looking French apple pie. I bent down for a closer look and a roach was staring at me eye-level — right behind an apple slice, I checked the refrigeration facilities and saw more roaches doing picket-duty around the bowls of butter. That place was a good initiation."

It helped prepare him for places like the snack shop at Third and Bainbridge:

"I almost fell down the cellar steps because they were rotted and covered with slime. There were no lights at all — just a strong, musty smell, and a sound like scratching or gurgling.

"The sound seemed to be behind a wall so I walked over there but I tripped on what I thought was a wet rag." The rag turned out to be the skeleton of a tomcat from which most of the fur and flesh had been chewed away. Hirschhorn found that the noise behind the wall was the echoing sound from a tunnel that the rats had carved out as a passageway.

"I figured that if the rats could take a big cat they could probably get a health inspector too, so I just left the place as fast as I could after the inspection had been completed."

ACCORDING TO THE CITY CHARTER, the Department of Public Health is entrusted with the environmental safety and welfare of Philadelphians. The food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the diseases they might fall victim to and the physical conditions under which they work are all within its jurisdiction.

Unfortunately the department is scandalously undermanned and underfinanced. It is being forced against its will to do a lousy job and it knows and resents it.

If the problem were just the classic Philadelphia story of money under the table, political payoffs, and public apathy, there might someday be a shaft of light at the end of the tunnel — even Dodge City was cleaned up eventually. But the crisis in health and sanitation goes deeper than pilfering pols or petty payola.