Health Codes Often at Odds With Ethnic Tastes

It’s a culture clash of gastronomical proportions.

From Los Angeles’ Koreatown to Westminster’s Little Saigon to San Francisco’s Chinatown, traditional Asian dishes best served at room temperature are running afoul of state health codes that require such foods to be kept either hot or cold.

Take Korean gim bap, rice rolled in seaweed, stuffed with meat and vegetables, a variation on Japanese sushi. If refrigerated, the rice hardens. Keep it hot and it dries up.

Or goi cuon, a Vietnamese appetizer of cooked shrimp wrapped in thin rice paper. Keep it too hot and the delicate shell shrivels up, too cold and the wrap bursts. The merchants insist that such food is safe to keep at room temperature for an entire day. Some risk citations from health officials.

“I could hide the food [from inspectors], but then the customers would not ask for them,” said a fast-food merchant in Little Saigon’s Asian Garden Mall over a counter full of sticky rice, goi cuon and other popular Vietnamese dishes--all kept at room temperature.

“If I refrigerate, no one will eat it,” said the man, who asked not to be named for fear of being cited. “I know this is America, but what are we supposed to do?”

Health officials in immigrant-heavy communities in California and elsewhere say temperature regulations are a constant source of conflict as inspectors try to apply uniform standards to hundreds of food items from around the world.

“Despite our best efforts, it is always a challenge,” said Jack Breslin, San Francisco’s assistant director of environmental health.

In a melting pot nation, such struggles aren’t new. Polish sausages were blamed for an outbreak of trichinosis in Chicago early in the century. Mexican-style cheese contaminated by listeria was blamed for 84 deaths in California in 1985. These examples prove that widespread food poisoning is a very real risk when food is improperly prepared and stored, public health experts say.

“It is not only a potential [risk], it is inevitable,” said Shirley Fannin, director of disease control for Los Angeles County’s Department of Health Services.

To health officials, the issue is simple: Room temperature can allow unhealthful microbes to multiply in food and sicken consumers. The only way to be safe is to expose the food to extreme temperatures.

“Bacteria know no cultural bounds,” said Allen Stroh, a program manager at the Orange County Health Care Agency. “Everybody coming from the old country, they bring their cultural baggage with them, and sometimes the baggage doesn’t make good health safety sense.”

But many merchants who sell ethnic food counter that such examples of outbreaks are probably the result of unsanitary food handling, which is dangerous regardless of temperature.

Health officials say food contamination is hard to trace to a specific source. Those who become ill are likely to remember only their last meal, which is not necessarily the culprit. Even when the tainted food is found, how it got contaminated is hard to trace. In the 1985 listeria outbreak linked to queso fresco, investigators were unable to find the exact source of contamination.

Temperature regulation, health officials say, is the last safeguard.

Thousands Cited Each Year

Inspectors in Los Angeles and Orange counties cite at least 2,800 food retailers for temperature violations every year. Offenses include malfunctioning refrigerators and improper thawing of meats. Some cases involved Mexican cheeses kept unrefrigerated so they remain soft, others Italian sausages hanging at room temperature in delicatessens. Many were for Asian dishes left out at room temperature.

In Orange County, the issue came to a boil earlier this year when a group of Vietnamese American restaurant and market owners demanded a meeting with health officials they said were unfairly targeting their businesses. The meeting in March calmed tensions, but the impasse continues.

The law isn’t aimed at Asian fare. It requires “all potentially hazardous food” to be kept cold (at or below 41 degrees Fahrenheit) or hot (at or above 140 degrees). That includes most staples, such as rice, beans, meats and dairy products, which can harbor bacteria. High acidity and low humidity also can keep bacteria from multiplying to dangerous levels.

Merchants often are willing to compromise a little on culinary tradition to avoid trouble with health inspectors. They will refrigerate the food even if it is not ideal, or adjust recipes to make the food bacteria-proof. But many Asian dishes consistently clash with the law.

Unlike Mexican-style cheese, Italian prosciutto or ceviche (raw fish marinated in lime or lemon), Asian food merchants say the dishes for which they are cited would be rendered inedible at extreme temperatures.

“With Asian items it is more of an issue,” agreed Terrance Powell, Los Angeles County’s chief environmental health specialist. “Maybe it is the tenacity on the part of that community or maybe their products are not as adaptable to the code.”

Businesses that repeatedly violate health codes can ultimately lose their licenses, but officials said it rarely comes to that. Usually, inspectors simply ask the merchants to destroy the food.

In Santa Clara County, health inspectors insist that food items be destroyed after two hours of room temperature display.

“It is a difficult situation, but we are bound by the law,” said Linda Keahey, the county’s director of consumer protection.

Other jurisdictions have similar rules. In Hawaii, food cannot remain at room temperature for more than four hours from time of preparation to consumption.

“We are in a world where you can cater to thousands of people,” said Brian Choi, head of sanitation for Hawaii, which had an outbreak of food poisoning a few years ago. The culprit, officials say, was bento, or lunch boxes. The Japanese term refers to packages of prepared food, usually rice and side dishes, popular for their practicality.

If laws are not enforced, Choi said, “ultimately, the public pays the price.”

Some critics, however, say the dangers are overstated.

“They want to make us live in a totally antiseptic society where flavor will be removed by law,” said Merrill Shindler, avowed food lover, restaurant critic and host of “Feed Your Face” on Los Angeles radio station KLSX-FM (97.1). “You have one society that has done it the same way for hundreds of years and another society that says ‘No, sorry, it is wrong; it is wrong the way you’ve been eating for 2,000 years.’ ”

Many consumers agree.

“I think the law should allow for cultural differences,” said Jin Kim, 27, while shopping recently at Garden Grove’s California Market, where the aisles were replete with room temperature rice cakes and gim bap. “We live in a very diverse society with people from all over the world. We need to recognize that.”

Restaurant owners in Los Angeles’ Chinatown found themselves in a similar bind two decades ago over Peking duck. Properly prepared, the fowl must be marinated and hung to dry at room temperature for hours. That made it illegal under the health code.

In 1983, the Legislature passed a bill exempting the item because, according to the revised law, the “methods used to prepare these foods inhibit the growth of microorganisms.”

Many Asian merchants want similar exemptions for such items as Korean rice cakes--another item frequently targeted by inspectors--and Vietnamese roast pork, which is prepared much like Peking duck.

“It is part and parcel of the fact that California is a very diverse community,” said Chris Leo, chief of staff for Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim), whose office considered tackling the issue earlier this year after Vietnamese store owners complained about the law. Given the number of food items in dispute, however, legislative exceptions seem unlikely.

“Can you imagine?” Leo asked. “We would be writing bills until the next century.”

Current law does allow individual exemptions from the temperature requirements, but only if the merchants can prove scientifically that their food is safe. To do so, a restaurant or market owner must catalog each step in the preparation of an item and test samples for their potential to harbor bacteria. The food purveyor then must get the resulting Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point plan approved by a health official.

“All we are saying is, prove [the food safe],” said Powell, the Los Angeles official. “There is no getting around it.”

The process is widely used by large food wholesalers, but it costs thousands of dollars in consultant and lab fees--onerous for small retailers with dozens of items to analyze, which even some health officials concede. The sheer volume of items and the growing number of ethnic restaurants and markets also make the task daunting.

In San Francisco, health inspectors have gone as far as writing up hazard analysis plans for merchants free of charge. They have written hundreds of plans, but are constantly playing catch-up as new businesses spring up.

At best, it has proved to be only a partial solution, said San Francisco’s Breslin. “It is a wand, but it ain’t magic.”

Inspectors Balance Science and Tradition

Meanwhile, health inspectors say they are in a delicate position balancing law and diplomacy.

“We make every effort to train our inspectors on the way they put things to people,” said Stroh, the Orange County health official. “We don’t want to say to them, ‘You are making people sick.’ They take a lot of pride in their food and traditions, but they don’t understand that we are coming from a scientific stance.”

Stroh and other health officials say the common response that “no one has gotten sick from this food” is no reason to relax standards. They say food poisoning is hard to track because so many cases go unreported. Many healthy people with minor symptoms may dismiss them as the flu. However, the risks for the young and the frail are serious. Food poisoning can cause diarrhea, vomiting, headaches and, in extreme cases, death.

“You have the protection of the public at stake,” Stroh said. “If we don’t do our job and people get sick, then they will ask why we didn’t we do anything in the first place.”

But Sam Sohn, general manager of Super1Mart in Buena Park, which was cited four times last year and twice this year for violating food temperature requirements, doesn’t buy it.

“If these products are supposed to be unhealthy, . . . [why are] Asians the biggest population in the world?” Sohn asked. “We must be doing something right.”