The Latest Bad Regulatory Idea: The Scarlet Letter on Restaurants
California, once again, has a found new way to impede the flow of good food into willing customers’ mouths. LA has pioneered what restauranteurs call the Scarlet Letter law. That LA law gives each restaurant a letter grade in terms of health inspection and forces the restaurant to post its grade in a big sign on the front of its establishment.
As California goes, so does the rest of the country. New York announced this week that it is adopting the LA standards and DC Nanny State Council Member Mary Cheh has introduced legislation to make a similar law apply to DC restaurants. What a way to help a bad economy!
I actually read the health department reports and find that most of my favorite awesome restaurants have some infraction, usually that there is no “food manager” at the restaurant when the food police show up, which would get them a “C”.
Marc Fisher, Wa Post columnist and sometime defender of freedom, made a great case against this ridiculous legislation:
Obviously, an A restaurant will win some customers from the C across the street. But what if the C place is really the cleaner place but just happens to have flunked on some of the unbelievably arcane rules contained in, for example, Los Angeles’s 70-page list of rules restaurants must follow? (And forgive me for asking, but what if that C eatery has both better food and a more pleasant atmosphere?) And what home kitchen would qualify for an A, or even a B? [snip]
Food inspectors are essential and there aren’t enough of them–witness the peanut scandal of recent days. But a fair and useful system would depend more on transparency than on the blunt instrument of letter grades that may not represent anything more than the misdeeds of a single vindictive, corrupt or incompetent inspector. Is there a D.C. resident who cannot imagine that their city might be home to such an inspector?
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Jody
