Guess Whats Coming With Dinner?
Chinese restaurants have no monopoly on food problems. The Health Department even has hassles with such symbols of purity as hospitals. Two center city bastions of medical knowledge would do well to review the axiom, "Physician, heal thyself."
• Jefferson Hospital, already suffering from an exhausted refrigeration system, recently went for six hours overnight during an early summer hot spell with no refrigeration at all when someone mistakenly hit the wrong switch. Jefferson escaped another run-in with the Health Department by dismissing one of its kitchen employees who was preparing the patients’ food trays while she herself was an active TB case.
• A few blocks away, Hahnemann Hospital has been ordered to clean up its garbage facilities and eliminate the rats’ nests around them or face a court injunction.
Another local landmark, the Farmers Market at the Reading Terminal, 12th and Market Streets, is a crisis area in the minds of many public health officials.
The inspector whose assignment is the Reading Terminal Market claims that a conservative estimate of the Terminal’s roach population alone is better than one million: "There’s just so much garbage and wastage in that place, that even mice and rats can coexist because there is plenty for both types of rodents to feed on. If the pickings were slimmer, the mice might be driven out."
No one in the Health Department completely blames the merchants at Reading Terminal because many have done everything possible to defeat the roach and rodent army that is slowly driving them out onto Market Street. Others have failed to cooperate with the inspectors and they will be facing court action in the near future.
"It’s a losing battle," explained the sanitarian assigned to the Terminal, "when you figure that every rodent in center city knows he can count on a square meal there after dark."
South Philadelphia rats feast at the Italian Market on South Ninth Street. The inspectors disagree about just how bad the Italian Market really is. Their lines of communication disintegrate along the edges of the generation gap. Old veterans who remember when fresh meat hung on rusty hooks in the open air feel relieved that the butcher shops on Ninth Street have come a long way in the last ten years.
They recall when health inspectors were welcomed with brandished meat cleavers and long Sicilian oaths. Just a couple of years ago in another part of South Philly two overly zealous investigators from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture were beaten up and thrown into the street by a proprietor who failed to see that cleanliness is next to godliness.
Several weeks ago the State Department of Justice charged a retail butcher at Ninth and Christian with selling "equine" meat that may have been horse, mule or donkey, under the label of hamburger.
