Dammit.

We had a health department inspection yesterday. The inspector didn't take kindly to our cured meats, house-made sausage, or our new chemical system: instead of buckets of cold bleach-water from the unlabeled ecolab dispenser, each cook had a bottle of food-safe sanitizer with mild detergent on his or her station. Apparently the buckets are OK despite the fact that dirty rags inevitably find their way in their, and I swear I've read that chlorine in water loses its sanitizing abilities with time, but the new chemicals we'd bought? Verboten.

It was a rough night. We work hard on the sausages and cured meats, and had to literally throw some things away. Nobody was in a very good mood.

So today I pulled up the health code for Fulton County, and read through it. Quite a bit of it was irrelevant, since we aren't new construction or mobile, but I read nothing prohibiting the grinding of meat or making of sausage. Nothing prohibiting meat-curing at refrigerated temperatures, and nothing that prohibited our sanitizing system.

This would be reassuring but for the liberal usage of phrases like "in the opinion of the inspector" throughout the code. Ours had apparently attended some servesafe training, but appeared to lack a basic understanding of the processes at work in the restaurant: that curing and cure salt make foods less attractive to harmful microbes, that sanitizer is sanitizer is sanitizer, no matter how it's stored. Some inspectors dock restaurants for having unwrapped straws for guests; some don't. Many, many parts of the inspection are open to an individual's interpretation. And there's no supervisor to talk to when a restaurant feels that they're being unfairly penalized.

It might be ideal to request a re-inspection, health code in hand, and to counter the missing points with references and explanations, but we scored too high to request one, and they're only granted at the discretion of the department of health. Since we hadn't been inspected in 18 months-the code states that restaurants will be inspected every 6-I suspect that very few restaurants get the requested re-inspections.

It seems that our best bet is to know our code and wait to see what the next inspector says. Or to lobby. You know, with all the free time and money that we have.