What’s in the sausage? Trouble!
June 2, 1907: Los Angeles city health inspector Nicholas Schwegel’s crackdown on restaurants so infuriated some owners that they were pushing for his dismissal, The Times reported under the headline, “Bugs and Old ‘Come-Backs’ Give Eating Its Drawbacks; Vermin Grown Gray in Service Surrender to Inspector of Restaurants.”
Restaurant proprietors particularly protested a new ban on “come-backs,” or leftovers from customers’ plates that many kitchens reused to make soup, gravy, hash and sausage.
“No one pretends to consider how this food may have been handled by those who paid for it,” the newspaper said.
Schwegel’s inspections unearthed colonies of maggots in hamburger meat, “vegetables stored in toilets” and “tainted meat tossed into the stock kettle.”
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