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.

But most of the time, we don’t even know what’s in our food, let alone where it came from… so when there’s a peanut recall, even if we toss any peanut butter we have in our cupboards, we might not think to look at the labels on our salad dressing, frozen pad thai, or even our pet food.

I suppose this is, in large part, a consequence of our convenience-based society, the ridiculously large scale that food is produced on today… but at this point, it is a wholly unnecessary one. Today, the technology at our disposal that could allow us to know where our food comes from – be it the myriad ingredients from sources currently unbeknownst to us, or purchased from the weekend farmer’s market. The main roadblock preventing this today is not that it is impossible to create a way to track our food back to the farm, or even that it would be too costly to implement a real-time tracking system accessible to consumers.

What I fear will prevent this from becoming reality is the very real fact that the manufacturers’ ability to keep us ignorant of where our food is sourced from helps them to maintain their profit line. Were we to know how our food is sourced, the degree of homogenization, and the risk at which that places us and the integrity of our food supply, demands would be made for changes that would be a real cost to the large-scale food producers of the nation. And so long as it is simply optional for food manufacturers to provide this information to the consumer, it won’t be done on a large enough scale to truly be useful… for it appears that trade secrets are more likely to be a concern than consumer safety. Still, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get started.

But I’ll get into that another day, I suppose.

More about the recalls:

• Pistachios and Peanuts: Far too many labels to list
• Spices from Union International Food Co./Uncle Chen & Lian How Labels
• Organic Eggs: Kirkland and Safeway O Organic Labels

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