Behind the Scenes With a Germ Detective

Elaine Demos walks into Vons in the Westside Pavilion. She is carrying a large suitcase. She walks purposefully to the meat case, selects a package of lean hamburger and tears it open. The busy grocery shoppers never even glance at her. Now she takes out a scale, measures out 2 ounces of meat and opens up a portable stove. “That’s enough to get a fat reading,” she says matter-of-factly.

Demos is a senior health inspector for the County of Los Angeles; part of her job is ensuring that when a market says its hamburger is lean, it is.

As the coils of the stove turn red hot and the juices begin to drip into a test tube, Demos continues her inspection. It will take about 15 minutes to get a true fat reading; meanwhile she marches over to the fish section. “The Health Department has been known to close markets down,” she says. “We come into a store, there is sewage floating up out of the floor, roaches running in the meat.”

No such luck here. “See,” she says, “the fish are fresh. Clear eyes, nice gills. They’re not flabby and yukky.” She eyes the layer of plastic between the fish and the ice and nods approvingly. “This is real good. It keeps the ice clean. This ice has to be the type you can eat; it’s not just some they chipped off somewhere.”

Now Demos frowns. She points up at a sign on a fish tank. “See, that sign advertising Maine lobster?” she asks. “I’ll ask the manager to show me an invoice so I can verify that this lobster actually comes from Maine. As for this ‘Pacific red snapper,’ you know there is only one true red snapper and it’s an Atlantic fish. Pacific is a rockfish kind of thing. But still it’s OK to call it that as long as they say Pacific. “

Fifteen minutes have passed. Demos goes back to her stove and checks the test tube that now holds blood, water and fat. The gauge says it is 18% fat; the law says it must be under 22%. She’s happy, and the manager, who hovers nearby throughout the entire inspection, is obviously relieved. “We test it ourselves every day,” he volunteers.

“Overall, this is one of the better markets I’ve been in. See this Hobart?” she says, pointing at a giant cake mixer in the bakery area. “At one place, an inspector actually found someone doing his laundry in one of these.”

Demos goes out to the loading dock and points out that there is no sign of decaying food and the trash bins are tightly covered. She takes out a ballpoint pen and tries to slide it under the giant door that rolls up to receive the delivery trucks. It is impossible to do. “Good. That means rats can’t get in either. You know,” she explains, as if the subject was something as ordinary as the weather, “rats have no shoulders, so they just stretch their bodies and whoosh, under the door.”

“This one place I inspected,” she elaborates, “had a real rodent problem, and the owner was scared to death of them. As I walked in, she said, ‘I just saw this rat running up a pipe with a hamburger bun in its mouth.’ ”

Los Angeles County has more than 60,000 restaurants and retail food outlets. Any area that is larger than 10 square feet and sells an edible product gets inspected, even pet food processing plants. But unlike police officers, who can issue tickets right on the spot, health inspectors only issue reports. “We try to work with people before we knock them over the head,” Demos says. “It’s progress, not perfection.”

Inspectors write up the offenses, explain the law and what needs to be done. This is not always cut and dried. One inspector found a Chinese restaurant that filled small table containers from a big can of soy sauce; nothing wrong there.

But he had a feeling. “Something made me check it,” he says, “so I took a ladle, dipped it in the soy sauce, and when I pulled it out it was full of roaches. I ordered the owner to throw it out. The owner didn’t want to. He simply wanted to strain it.”

Demos has a degree in biological science and has been with the Los Angeles County Health Department for seven years. She says that in all that time she’s never even been offered a bribe. As she writes her report on the market she notes each detail that needs attention: She has found dirty fan guards, cutting boards that could stand a little bleaching, the meat man’s bloody apron. “A harbor for bacteria,” she says, shaking her head. She misses nothing, including fruit flies buzzing around the cherry syrup. Now she sifts through a packet of inspection forms she’s brought with her (they resemble school report cards) and selects the next destination.

It’s a yogurt shop. After announcing herself, Demos makes a beeline for the restroom. “If you can’t wash your hands,” she says, scrubbing as if she were a surgeon about to perform a major operation, “we would have to close them.” Out in the front, the water in the dipper wells is running and cold, the freezer is clean and the frozen yogurt is the proper temperature. “Everything is really clean,” she says, beaming as she tucks her thermometer away.

But the owner looks worried. He tells her he has been waiting all year for summer for business to pick up. “First we waited for Christmas and nothing happened,” he says, “now we are waiting for summer.”

Next stop is New York Deli, a tiny place that cooks all its food in a space the size of a small walk-in closet. The small stove is so caked with food that it looks filthy. Demos barely gives it a glance. “It’s new dirt,” she explains. “Look at how big the menu is. Salads. Sandwiches. They boil the macaroni, they cook the soups, things splash. Now if it was brown and crusted, that’s old dirt, and an entirely different matter.”

What does bother her are the deep, uncovered storage containers in the walk-in box. “Break those buckets down into shallow pans,” she orders the owner. “This way they could take 20 hours to cool down to 45 degrees. It’s a real potential for bacterial growth.”

Out comes her trusty thermometer again: Demos loves taking temperatures. “The water is nice and hot,” she says, turning on the tap. “And the temperature of this turkey breast, it’s over 170 degrees.” She’s positively beaming now.

“Hot food must be over 140 degrees,” she continues, admitting that she tends to dwell on temperature and hygiene. Demos used to work in the unit that handles suspected food poisonings; last year alone, she says, they received more than 2,000 complaints. And most cases go unreported. “People blow it off by saying they had a bug or the flu, but it could actually have been something they ate. Some bacteria don’t hit for three days, salmonella may take 12 to 24 hours to hit, and hepatitis A can hit after an entire month. How are you going to remember what you ate a month ago? And that’s why,” she winds up, “temperature is my thing.”

Her colleague, Terrance A. Powell, an expert on outdoor events such as food festivals, feels the same way. “You go to parts of Mexico,” he says, “and you’ll find blood sausage hanging out, full of blood and flies. That may be acceptable in Mexico; it is not acceptable here. Take sushi: In Japan, the fish is stored and eaten at room temperature. Here this is not allowed. Yet we still encounter sushi chefs who want the fish at 65 degrees.”

Powell claims that over the last 10 years, there’s been a decline in basic sanitation practices. “We don’t know what’s generated that,” he says. “It may be because we are getting different cultures operating food facilities, and their standards are different from California standards.” He admits that Los Angeles has particularly stringent health laws. “You go to Philadelphia,” Powell says, “and up and down the streets, there are hundreds of barbecue vendors. We don’t allow it here.”

Even chefs trained in the best schools in Europe have different standards. “They come to this country and try to operate in the same way they were taught,” says Bob Snow, chief sanitarian. “What’s really funny is, we find even they don’t understand temperatures.”

Back in the mall, Demos has grabbed a Diet Coke and is heading to her next inspection. “I can remember the kitchen now as if I were back in it,” she says, her mind still on the deli. “There was the sink with the water taps missing, those pans that were dumped in the mop sink. The workers were wearing those cute baseball caps as hair restraints.” She closes her eyes and smiles. “And the egg salad . . . the perfect temperature, 40 degrees.”