There's gum stuck on the underside of a chair in the Clark County Health District auditorium, where a hundred or so soon-to-be food handlers are about to watch a video aimed at helping them maintain proper health standards. It's a hunk of wet, gooey, used chewing gum that, should one reach under one's chair to scoot forward, one would get under one's fingernails, complete with saliva, bacteria, sticky crap, dirt and an untold number of deadly diseases.
The health video starts. Although the crowd has been warned before to turn off cell phones, the ringing begins ringing within seconds. They chat on their phones, they yawn aloud and frequently, one appears to be balancing her checkbook.
The video is a prerequisite to obtaining a health card, which is a prerequisite to holding a food-industry job in Clark County. The routine is: You come in, fill out some paperwork, get a hepatitis A shot, pay a $35 fee, watch the video, get your paperwork stamped, get a card and go to work. But something makes Health District officials suspect that maybe people aren't really retaining the information presented in the video; that maybe they're not even paying attention.
Frightening to think that they're not. The movie covers everything from washing one's hands properly—that is, with soap, under hot water, up to the elbows—to parasites and proper food-storage temperatures and how to calibrate a food thermometer.
This video is in English and the district offers one in Spanish, but those who speak only, say, Mandarin, can either sit through the film without understanding anything and get their card stamped anyway, or call on the services of an interpreter. The Asian Chamber of Commerce provides interpreters for by-appointment screenings for those who want to comprehend the health instructions. It's a rare occurrence, says Ann Markle, the District's health records manager.
Frustrated by the notion that food workers are arriving at their jobs unprepared, officials want to begin testing would-be food handlers before they get their card.
"We want them to learn things," Markle says. "So we're going to drift to a test procedure and take away the movie, and have them study booklets and take a test like the DMV test, so that we make sure that they're learning."
Candidates will have the opportunity to retake the test until they get it right, and the test will be changed frequently to make cheating difficult.
The plan is dependent upon the county getting grants to pay for the testing procedure. Markle says the county has applied to the Centers for Disease Control for a three-year, $180,000-per-year grant to buy materials and testing kiosks. It should find out whether it will receive the grant late this summer.
Sitting in the movie theater picking chewing gum out from under one's fingernails, listening to a couple of guys discuss the finer points of Spider-Man while onscreen a woman explains the importance of rejecting smelly poultry deliveries, one might get completely and utterly freaked out about the idea of ever eating in a local restaurant again.
But many communities around the nation have no government food-handling training at all, Markle says. In fact, in most major cities, you're expected to learn that sort of thing on the job. The health regulators stay out of it until they find violations at the restaurant. Somehow, sitting in this theater, that falls short of being comforting.
The movie lets out, a slew of new health-card candidates gets a stamp and heads on to a future in food handling. But not before we ask them a few things about the movie:
"How do you calibrate a food thermometer?"
"I won't need to do that, I'm going to be a bartender," says a young man with a buzz cut and long shorts.
"How do you wash glasses properly?
"Wash, rinse, sanitiiiiiize," he says. "No problem."
A middle-aged woman walks out. "What's the proper temperature for cold food storage?"
"Oh, well, was it 40 degrees?"
We don't know either. Was it?
"What's the proper temperature for cooking poultry?"
"I don't remember, really ..."
"Where do you store raw meats?"
"In the refrigerator."
"Above or below ready-to-eat foods?"
"Above?"
(Wrong.)
"How many hours can food be left in the 'danger zone temperature range' before it needs to be thrown out?"
"Was that the 40 degrees?"
(No. Food shouldn't be left between 41 degrees Farenheit and 140 degrees Farenheit for more than four hours.)
"Where will you be working?"
"I'd better not say."