random facts girl

In San Francisco, there are over 600 restaurants and retailers (622, according to a spreadsheet released by the California DPH.) affected by the recent recall of spices packaged by the Union International Food Company under the labels Lian How and Uncle Chen. The list includes a bunch of liquor stores and groceries where consumers may have unwittingly purchased the potentially contaminated products… but hundreds of restaurants are included in the list as well.

The establishments include a large number of smaller Asian restaurants and corner stores, but also include some well-known SF establishments ranging from the low-cost dives where you’d likely expect to get food poisoning anyway, to like Burma Super Star and Mandalay, Boogaloo’s, Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, Bissap Baobab, the King of Thai chain, Peasant Pies, Osha, Seller’s Markets, to places that are a little more ‘up there’ Espetus Churrascaria and Tryptich. Even bars like Delerium are affected. [See the full list after the cut.]

In a quick glance at the restaurants, I didn’t notice any of the restaurants which label themselves as ’sustainable’ sticking out as being on the list… but that doesn’t mean that I think this is a “sustainable vs. industrial” food production issue, as it might appear. And I’m not laying any fault on the restaurants themselves…. not really.

What it really communicates to me is the bizarre disconnect between us and where our food comes from – especially when we’re dining out in restaurants. When I was still a vegetarian (at least when in Florida and the Midwest), not only was it impossible to find out where my food came from – most of the time, I couldn’t even find out if there was chicken in it or not. The wait staff usually doesn’t know… and in many places, there’s a communication gap between the servers and the kitchen. Although in San Francisco, it’s a little different… you’re usually able to find out if there’s meat in a meal… but if you have other dietary restrictions, restaurants are still not always accommodating – they’re unwilling to let you know what’s in a dish to protect their recipe, they simply don’t know, or they unintentionally (or, perhaps, sometimes intentionally) disseminate misinformation.

Note: the next page takes a while to load with all the restaurant data.

Why I care?One of my first dining experiences in the city happened during the spinach scare of ‘06. Spinach is one of my mainstays, and having gone without fresh spinach for a week (!), I was fiending. I visited an unnamed creperie at the mouth of the West Portal tunnel, and when their menu said that they weren’t serving fresh spinach in salads. Heartened, I asked if they were serving spinach in crepes, and they said they were; I asked if their spinach was fresh or frozen, and they said it was frozen and cooked. Twenty minutes later, halfway through my crepe, I hear a crunch, look down and see the spinach in the middle looked different from the spinach at the edges: not cooked… not frozen… fresh. I was one week into a new job, no health coverage yet to speak of, and rightfully concerned… yet more so, appalled that this could happen.

So even if you’re as diligent as possible, sometimes there simply isn’t a way to protect yourself, unless you cook all your meals from scratch – in which case you would be missing out on a world of culinary possibilities! There should be a way that we can protect ourselves… perhaps a sort of intelligent recipe profile – lists that restaurants can share with the consumer and public health officials… not necessarily nutritional information, the proportions of ingredients, or the brands of the ingredients themselves (in the case of things like soy sauce, etc). This would particularly help in situations where there is a communication gap between employees and patrons. However, it would require communication and cooperation from government and food manufacturers and distributors… and most importantly, funding (btw… if anyone knows of resources to fund a project like this, let me know – I have a great plan for designing such a system.)

Just let us know what we’re eating. And when we ask where it came from, tell us.

Here are the restaurants from that spreadsheet released by the California DPH. that contains other California cities as well. No, it’s not pretty… but nobody is paying me to put it up. Also, keep in mind that this may be either a general distribution list or a list of customers who actually received the contaminated products… the state wasn’t totally clear on that. But hey, better to be safe than sorry, right?

Related posts:

1. Eating the Golden Pagoda
2. Lucky means it’s 24 Hours… not because it’s any good.
3. Yamo is lots, but not a lot.