{ "id": "2003-february-eatery-data-shows-poor-food-handling", "slug": "2003-february-eatery-data-shows-poor-food-handling", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-february-eatery-data-shows-poor-food-handling.html", "year": 2003, "month": "February", "monthNum": 2, "headline": "Eatery data shows poor food handling", "kicker": "PUBLIC HEALTH", "author_name": "Fred Vallance-Jones", "author_title": "Database editor", "affiliation": "The Hamilton Spectator", "summary": "A Hamilton, Ontario newspaper investigation into restaurant safety practices revealed widespread food-handling violations and inadequate health department inspections, while municipal bureaucrats initially obstructed access to inspection records through excessive fees and delay tactics.", "keywords": [ "inspection", "restaurant", "database" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Data & Databases", "Health & Environment" ], "technologies": [ "FoxPro" ], "full_text": "The cook in the small family restaurant wanted to make sure the eggs weren't greasy.\n\nSo before the heaping plate of breakfast went to the customer, she used a reusable cloth lying on the counter to dab the eggs. She then put the grease-laden rag down, ready for the next meal. It would be used for six hours before being washed.\n\nSuch was the scene witnessed by a public health inspector in Hamilton, Ontario, an industrial city with nearly half a million residents, about an hour's drive southwest of Toronto.\n\nThe inspector wrote about the incident in his notes, one of more than 2,000 pages of inspection reports released to The Hamilton Spectator as part of our investigation into restaurant safety.\n\nThe resulting five-part series, called \"Reservations,\" revealed shocking food-handling practices in the back kitchens of well-known eateries.\n\nBut the series was more than just a recitation of horror stories about mouse infestations, rotting food and cooks who never washed their hands. Using computer-assisted reporting, it also revealed that the city health department was frequently failing to do the inspections required to protect the public, and even when serious problems were found, little or nothing was being done.\n\nSenior managers at the newspaper had wanted to do a story on restaurant safety for some time. There would be high reader interest, and similar CAR reports by other newspapers had led to reforms in several North American cities, including Toronto.\n\nThe responsibility eventually fell to me because of my special interests in CAR and public documents research. Little did I know that getting out of the starting gate was going to take the better part of a year.\n\nObstruction 101\n\nMy goal was to obtain a copy of the city's database of food premise inspections so I could see which establishments had the worst records and whether the city was doing the minimum inspections required to protect the public.\n\nBut the municipal health bureaucrats were in no hurry to hand over a disk.\n\nOntario has an open-records law that specifically applies to municipalities. Under it, the city was supposed to make a decision on my request within 30 days of my filing it in March 2000. In reality, it took five months and a meeting with the city clerk before I finally got my first response.\n\nThe answer was no. I could not have the database. But if I was willing to hand over a check for more than 1,000 Canadian dollars (about $630 U.S.), they'd be happy to make paper printouts.\n\nThe health bureaucrats said they couldn't provide an electronic copy.\n\nThe provincial health ministry had designed the database system and provided it to municipalities to make it easier for them to report inspection data to the ministry. In addition to being able to spit out what the province needed, the system allowed for some standard printed reports, including a list of inspections for any one premise. The city's staff had no idea how to make a copy of the underlying data they had themselves entered.\n\nWhen questioned they did provide a key piece of information, however. The application was written in Microsoft FoxPro.\n\nAs I had used FoxPro extensively in the past, I now knew it should be straightforward to write a query to produce the data I wanted. I called the ministry people who had designed the application, and after some initial reluctance, they agreed to write the query and provide it to the city to run.\n\nBy November 2000 I finally had a disk in hand, the cost about $30.\n\nTable troubles\n\nOnce my disk arrived, I was not surprised to find the data was dirty.\n\nThere were two tables. One contained information about establishments, each identified with a unique ID. It linked to detailed inspection information stored in the second table.\n\nIn the establishment table, a handful of the ID numbers were duplicated, with more than one establishment having the same number. Usually it happened because a premise had changed hands (and names) and someone had neglected to create a new ID. In two instances the mistake was inexplicable. I chose to eliminate those two premises from any further analysis.\n\nThe inspection table was twice as dirty. Some inspection entries were duplicated, and a later review of paper records revealed that a small number of inspections were not entered at all.\n\nI had to design queries to eliminate the duplicates, which could be identified from one of the fields. As for the missing inspections, they seemed few in number and health bureaucrats maintained the data was at least 98 percent complete. The deficiencies were later revealed to readers.\n\nTo decide which paper files I wanted to see, I used a field that recorded the number of critical violations found on an inspection visit. A critical violation is a mistake in food preparation or handling that has the potential to cause food poisoning, such as storing foods at temperatures where bacteria thrive and grow.\n\nI compiled a list of premises that either had large total numbers of critical violations or a large number of failing inspections. I then submitted an informal request for the detailed paper files.\n\nWithout the data, we could never have zeroed in so well on premises that had consistently had problems.\n\nDirty dining\n\nI received the paper records in early 2001. From there, the project sat on the backburner until May, when City Editor Jim Poling assigned me to work on it full time.\n\nBy that point, I had received an updated run of the inspection data from the city. Using Microsoft Access, I queried the database extensively and determined how many times each premise had been inspected, as well as how many inspections the department was doing.\n\nUsing Excel, I calculated how long passed between individual inspections of each establishment. All of this revealed that the city was falling far short of the inspection schedule required by provincial law. In some cases, years passed between visits, a fact that I confirmed with the owners of the establishments themselves.\n\nThere was still a key piece missing.\n\nRoger Gillespie, the night managing editor at The Spectator, observed: It was important that the reader understand the potential consequences of a system that failed. That meant documenting cases of food poisoning.\n\nI filed a new freedom of information request to another branch of the public health department, asking for records detailing outbreaks from the previous year and a half.\n\nWhile I waited for those documents, I interviewed restaurant owners, food safety experts, the inspectors and top health bureaucrats. By early September I had received records documenting several dozen outbreaks or suspected outbreaks of food poisoning and was tracking down one of the victims, who had suffered the humiliation of seeing the guests at her wedding meal fall ill.\n\nWhen \"Reservations\" launched on Nov. 24, 2001, we led with the wedding story and documented the failure of the city to live up to its obligations to protect the public.\n\nOn Monday (The Spectator, like many Canadian papers, does not publish on Sunday), we wrote about the restaurants with the worst inspection records. Three more days of stories followed, including a look at systems used by other cities to disclose the results of inspections to the public. We also ran sidebars giving necessary background on food safety issues and posted summary information derived from the city database on our Web site.\n\nThe response from the public and politicians was overwhelming in the true sense of that overused word.\n\nMy voicemail was overloaded, letters and e-mails poured in and our Web site was swamped as outraged readers found out for the first time about filthy conditions in restaurant kitchens and the city's failure to make them clean up.\n\nBy the second day of our series, the politicians were already promising a cleanup. By the time the last of the stories ran, councillors had voted to hire additional inspectors and to develop an action plan to fix the problems identified by the newspaper.\n\nIn the meantime, shortly after our series ran, the owner of that family restaurant ordered his staff to stop using the \"egg cloths.\" He still insisted the cloths posed no risk to the public, but his diners apparently thought otherwise.\n\nContact Fred Vallance-Jones by e-mail at fvjones@hamiltonspectator.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1994-march-dining-on-eatery-data", "score": 0.319 }, { "slug": "1998-february-soups-on", "score": 0.271 }, { "slug": "1998-february-inspection-du-jour-restaurants-revealed", "score": 0.264 }, { "slug": "2001-januaryfebruary-restaurant-inspections", "score": 0.254 }, { "slug": "1998-february-processor-violations", "score": 0.177 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-february-eatery-data-shows-poor-food-handling.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-february-eatery-data-shows-poor-food-handling.json" }