Aggravatingly, some of it is. The organic food regulations are impossible for the small farmers who invented the idea. Only mega corps can do it, and their definition is not much better (if at all) than industrial farms.
It's still way better than Upton Sinclair's time. But it would be nice if the FDA and USDA were run by people who eat rather than sell food.
There are also laws about how fast you can drive to your restaurant and whether you can assault your employees once you get there. Neither of them have a place in a conversation about the efficacy of food safety laws, nor do the building permits you mention. We have different laws to regulate different domains and they exist largely because someone cut corners in the past and people literally died.
> Neither of them have a place in a conversation about the efficacy of food safety laws
They do because these fees are paid to engineers and architects as well as to the local health authority to certify that the restaurant is up to local "health codes", keeping in mind this is pre-lease and pre-construction. They regulate the size of pipes, the potential ventilation, amount of washrooms, amount of sinks, etc... in the name of food safety.
Now that's fine but why do governments get tens of thousands of those fees? There's also no nuance for small-scale operators. And if you buy a defunct restaurant that's already paid those fees, you get to pay them again. Again, these are to comply with "health regulations" and are things that no non-food business needs to pay.
> And none of it prevents bad food handling practices by minimum wage staff.
Your argument is that all restaurants in your area handle food unsafely? Or that some do flagrantly and without penalty? Or that one has once and you got sick and so all the regulations are worthless as a result?
Trying to understand what argument you think you’re making, here, and specifically how factually bereft and vacuous it actually is.
Maybe try reading or understanding. We're talking a stage where there is no lease and there are no employees. There's just an idea and an empty space.
You need to pay various levels of governments, engineers and architects 10's of thousands just to make blueprints and have them stamped by 2 levels of governments before a construction permit is even given in the name of "food safety".
Then you need to build the thing, pay more fees to get it actually certified. Then maybe you can think about hiring and training employees, a million or so dollars later.
The equivalent is a tech startup needing to pay government and some regulatory organization $50k just to be allowed to buy a laptop to then maybe think about writing code in the future.
Yes, paying government fees before there's a single employee doesn't magically imbue the employees (that don't exist yet) with the knowledge of safe food handling...
> We're talking a stage where there is no lease and there are no employees. There's just an idea and an empty space.
Do you think cold storage requirements, sinks, and other functional items in the kitchen don't prevent poor food handling practices?
> a million or so dollars later.
Eye roll.
> The equivalent is a tech startup needing to pay government and some regulatory organization $50k just to be allowed to buy a laptop to then maybe think about writing code in the future.
Your shitty react SPA likely won't kill anyone because you didn't bother installing any sinks and didn't think your refrigerator needed to appropriately keep raw chicken at the right temperature. But if it could, maybe they should. Maybe there would be less Meta engineers and we'd all be better off.
> Yes, paying government fees before there's a single employee doesn't magically imbue the employees (that don't exist yet) with the knowledge of safe food handling...
And yet it provides them with the appropriate tools to keep that food safe after.
> Maybe try reading or understanding.
Ironic lead in, when you don't actually know what regulations you're even whining about or why they might exist.
> Do you think cold storage requirements, sinks, and other functional items in the kitchen don't prevent poor food handling practices?
They make it easier to have safe food handling practices but they don't prevent poor ones either. Otherwise we'd have eliminated food poisoning from restaurants and institutions. Canada sees 14 million food poisoning cases per year (out of a population of 40 million) and many of those are from restaurants and institutions.
There's also many, many jurisdictions with less regulation. Most of the US, everywhere I've seen in the EU, most of Asia from what I've seen. Dunno how much you've eaten in Canada but our food scene is on average, pretty shit.
