Temperatures Rising Over Over Nuances in Safety Law

A food safety law that took effect with little fanfare at the beginning of this year has restaurant owners and chefs scratching their heads.

The law, the Lauren Beth Rudolph Food Safety Act of 1997, introduced by Howard Kaloogian (R-Carlsbad), sets minimum doneness temperatures for different types of meat and eggs. It is an attempt to prevent food poisoning occurrences like the one that killed San Diego County 6-year-old Lauren Beth Rudolph, who died after eating a fast food hamburger tainted by a strain of E. coli. Many potentially dangerous bacteria and other pathogens can be rendered harmless if foods are cooked to high enough temperatures.

The problem is that in some cases the new law raises more questions than it answers.

Hamburgers, for example, must be cooked to at least 157 degrees (medium to medium-well). But if you tell your waiter you want a medium-rare hamburger, the restaurant can serve it to you. If the waiter asks how you want your hamburger and you say “medium-rare,” that’s OK, too. But the waiter is not allowed to ask, “Do you want that medium-rare?”

At the same time, steak tartare--made with raw ground beef--is considered perfectly fine. Steak itself--made with muscle meat--is also assumed to be safe, because any bacteria will be on the surface and will be killed by even brief cooking.

Another example: A classic Caesar salad made with a lightly cooked egg is OK if it is prepared at your table--but not if it is made in the kitchen. And you may as well forget about your creamy, slightly runny scrambled eggs and omelets, too, unless you specifically order them that way.

What about tuna? Some believe that the law says a chef may slice a big piece of tuna and serve it raw as sashimi, but cannot sear it and serve it with the center rare, as many fashionable restaurants do.

“The goal of the [law] is to make sure that food is safely cooked,” says Jim Waddell, the acting chief of the food safety section for the state Department of Health Services and a member of the committee that wrote it. “We’re not trying to outlaw any historically consumed foods, as long as the customer has knowledge of how that food is prepared.”

In other words, it is acceptable for a customer to make a voluntary informed choice to eat a hamburger medium-rare. Sushi and steak tartare are allowed because everyone knows they’re served raw. And if the Caesar salad is prepared at the table, the customer can see that the eggs are only lightly cooked.

“When you’re asking for sushi or sashimi, you’re asking for raw fish, whereas when a chef sears it, people may be expecting it to be thoroughly cooked,” says Alfonso Medina, chief environmental health specialist for the Los Angeles County Health Department. “That’s where we’ve got to apply the law.”

Or maybe not. Despite the fact that both Medina and Waddell agreed that the rare-seared tuna would not be allowed, Chris Woge, a state Health Department program specialist specializing in seafood, says it would be perfectly legal, since it comes from a single muscle and has not been chopped or stuffed--the only cases in which fish temperatures are dictated in the new law.

This difference of opinion does not surprise Gerald Breitbart, a Los Angeles-based consultant to the California Restaurant Assn. who was also involved in writing the law.

“We’re getting people complaining about the fact that the inspectors don’t understand the law,” he says. “There’s a great deal of misunderstanding. We tried to eliminate that misunderstanding by requiring within the law that the state provide training to all local jurisdictions.

“Well, they tried. The inspectors have all had training in it, but apparently most of them didn’t listen. That’s not an uncommon problem.”

The law is an addition to the California Uniform Retail Food Facilities Act, or CURFFL, which governs the food service industry. The original law was specific about food storage temperatures but did not address cooking temperatures.

The new law specifies that ground meat must be cooked to 157 degrees, eggs and food containing raw eggs must be cooked to 145 degrees, pork must be cooked to 155 degrees, and poultry and chopped or stuffed fish must be cooked to 165 degrees unless “the consumer specifically orders that these foods be individually prepared less than thoroughly cooked.”

“With CURFFL, there is a lot of detail in other areas about food and temperature,” says Medina. “This law gives us the right to probe our thermocouples and check temperatures in cooking. When we go out to do restaurant inspections, taking the temperature of the food is very important to our work.”

However, Waddell, of the Department of Health Services, says the law was intended more as a guideline than as a set of specific requirements: “This was not intended so much for enforcement but more as a guide for the restaurant industry to use for establishing safe cooking processes. Only in gross cases where there are repeat complaints or observed violations should enforcement come in.”

Breitbart says Southern California restaurant inspectors, embattled after a series of television exposes, are missing the forest for the trees. “Ninety percent of this is response to the [KCBS] series,” he says. “They’re taking a lot of heat politically.

“You cannot legislate minutiae. Unfortunately, the health department wishes to regulate minutiae. They’re trying to crack down on things that have no relationship to food safety only because they’re in the rule book.”