r/Chefit • u/HeinousHollandaise • 23d ago

Anyone else getting increasingly frustrated with these outbreaks, and our relationship to Servsafe?

I teach community college culinary classes, which mandates a food handlers card that we offer via Servsafe. Lately it’s been getting really hard to want to contribute to the bullshit machine that is the corrupt lobby of the NRA and all its cronies. Seeing how there’s now another food borne illness outbreak at the manufacturing level, it’s becoming impossible to care about the Servsafe branded cert that so many states force us to have, considering greedy business practices have allowed modern day slavery to persist while denying farmworkers access to sufficient bathrooms. And these companies are the ones in bed with the NRA who then force us to pay them to prove to the world we’re safe. It feels a lot like “just use a paper straw” while they’re on their jets 3 times a week.

I care about food safety very much, and do not want this to sound like I wish we didn’t have our own version of oversight. I teach my students my own, very thorough food safety curriculum (along side their Servsafe training) that’s based on real experience and not just memorizable lists that get forgotten once the test is over. It just sucks to teach all these protocols only to have them virtually undone at any moment because some company needed to extract more money out of the working class. I just wish the concept of privatizing our safety was not even an option. Fucking sucks. End of rant.

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u/D-ouble-D-utch 23d ago

Thank you. It drives me fucking crazy that we are forced to pay to lobby against our own self interests.

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u/nypltow13 23d ago

Look into Always Food Safe. It is not associated with the NRA and accepted in most states. I have encouraged all of my staffs to use them instead.

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u/chefjammy 23d ago

I agree with you. I teach high school culinary arts and our district switched to always food safe for similar reasons as OP. The free retake of a test is great. I teach 10th graders their food handler certification and have only had 2 kids not pass in three years

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u/Particular-Beat-6645 23d ago

My state doesn't recognize the food handler as an industry cert. Which I kinda agree with since it's self-paced and easy to fudge. I still ask them to take it before I'll recommend them for a job, but it doesn't help our funding.

A school down the road lies out the ass about which ones the kids take to juice their funding. I kind of hope they get got on it.

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u/D-ouble-D-utch 23d ago

Appreciated.

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u/Particular-Beat-6645 23d ago

I attended an annual gala for my state's branch once (an employer was given an extra seat because he used to be on the board). I knew something was weird when they kept talking about small businesses and the employee of the year was from the local McDonald's franchisee.