Maybe this should be a letter to the editor, but

[mrsbrown]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/shame-dodgy-food-handlers-councils/2007/03/11/1173548021795.html

Has anyone else noticed that, in an environment where up to a third of food businesses don't comply with food handling regulations, there aren't many people unwell or dying from the food they buy?

Based on the registered DHS food safety template there's a lot of record keeping involved. Stuff that people who are dealing with food everyday have always managed with using common sense? (yes, I know common sense isn't so common.)

I feel that we've over formalised the food safety process. People aren't learning to trust their experience or intuition and soon we'll all be dying from ignorance.


Also,

Would a public-public partnership (PPP) work to get this built?

a 15 to18-kilometre radius centred on Flinders Street Station. It could run Sandringham, Moorabbin, Huntingdale, Monash University, Glen Waverley, Nunawading, Macleod, La Trobe University, Thomastown, Broadmeadows, Melbourne Airport, Keilor Plains, Deer Park and Newport. For circle closure and to avoid unnecessary reversing, the circle trains could continue from Newport to Flinders Street to Sandringham and the reverse.

We could get all of the people who would use the train to subscribe and offer them low or no cost travel on the future train.

Comments

[sootysmudge.livejournal.com]

As a supporter of public transport this sounds fantastic to me, but considering the lack of importance governments of all persuasions put on PT it will never happen. The PT to unis is appalling.

However l did utilise a recent improvement in PT. This weekend l took the train to Geelong, a lovely new train, fast (well until it hits the Melbourne suburban network) and reduced prices.

Actually

[erudito.livejournal.com]

Governments subsidise public transport lots. The real problem is that where jobs are is continuing to be much more decentralised and urban densities are falling. If you have the urban densities (and job centralisation) of Manhattan and Hong Kong, PT is the dominant form of transport. In a city (like most of them) such as, say, Melbourne, where the % of jobs in the CBD is falling and urban densities are falling, PT is a somewhat losing wicket. Even if you put tolls on the major arterials and shove up parking charges in the CBD.

Public-Private

[erudito.livejournal.com]

On the Public-Private partnership bit, it would make me more confident that the big circle proposal would be worth the cost. (No argument it would make the system more user-friendly, but whether sufficient more users would actually eventuate seems less clear.)

[pearl]

The problem isn't so much that people are being unhygeinic and doing bad things with the food, it's that the emphasis has become one of leaving a clear paper trail so that if someone does get sick, then you can have proof that says 'it wasn't our fault because we did this-and-this-and-this.'

People can't be bothered writing down every afternoon what temperature their freezer is, so they just pick a number and write it down across the board. That is impossible because you open the freezer to get things out, put things in, and as you're putting room-temperature food into a cold room, the overall temperature rises slightly. etc. (Real life example is working with the freezer in the herbarium, the temperature spikes every Monday because that's when it is opened and emptied. It then drops slowly as the day(s) progress.)

Paper trails are good in the whole "covering ones' arse" sense, but they are difficult for people to actually implement if they're busy running a business at the same time. That's where the system falls down and the H&S breaches occur. People are still trusting their intuition and their innate ability to tell when food is overripe or undercooked, but they're not passing that knowledge over on to the paper forms.

Does that make any sense? The problem isn't a lack of common sense in relation to the actual food handling, but a lack of common sense about the paperwork.

Could be both

[erudito.livejournal.com]

What you are saying makes much sense, but the regulations could also be a bit overdone (even beyond the paperwork bits).

The cost of regulation is not very visible to the folk who notionally vote for them, and is certainly not borne by the people who dream them up, so you have cost-benefit problems built in.