I used to make cheese. Our cheese cave was a large underground brick structure. It was mostly for tourists, the whole thing was supposed to look "rustic" and "traditional," and it did look really nice, but it was shit at controlling humidity, sort of important when making cheese. My boss always wanted to get a walk in fridge where we could more efficiently control temperature and humidity, but he was never allowed because the tourist aspect was as important (maybe more) than the farming/cheesemaking, and tourists wanted rustic.
Anyway, that's not the point. The winter was extremely wet. As winter comes to a close, the snow started melting and everything started thawing. Well, brick is porous and the ground is extremely wet. Because the builder (who was incompetent and I have more horrible safety stories from this farm) had not built a dome around our cave, water ended up saturating the brick and was now dripping down onto the cheese, bringing with it, of course, listeria. We had to test every now and then for the health inspector, and one day we tested and literally every square inch of that cave had listeria. Listeria, we realized, was dripping down from the roof of the cave onto the cheese that we were selling to tourists.
So, instead of stopping the sale of certain cheese, improving the cave or (what we should have done) getting a walk-in freezer, what we ended up doing was taking some really half assed measures to protect the cheese (like putting paper over it) and occasionally spraying a solution to kill the listeria in the areas we could reach (so, not the roof, which was the main danger), especially before the health inspector came - of course the listeria would shortly just start leaking through the walls again. And so we ended up hiding our massive listeria outbreak from the health inspector and kept selling the cheese. I managed to leave that same spring.
Anyway, the elon musk toxic tunnel sludge story reminded me of this and I wanted to get this story off my chest. Feel free to drop your own work safety stories in the comments.
A reminder to anyone working in the food industry that your health department almost certainly takes anonymous tips and they almost certainly take them seriously.
If you ever find yourself in this sort of a situation it's important and in the interests of public health to make a report.
Most health department officials take their jobs super seriously (at least in the developed world) and I'd be shocked if half of the tips they get don't come from workers themselves. They would likely deal with this all the time and a good health department official is going to come up with a cover story or they're simply going to be obstinate as heck and simply not give any reason as to why they are back for another inspection even though it's only been 2 months since the last one.
yeah tbh I should have. But i was still very young and it was one of my first jobs. At that point all I could think about was how I was gonna get out of there.
I didn't mean to drag you over this or anything, I'm just putting the word out so that people will connect your story to my PSA and that, maybe, if they encounter this sort of situation in their own lives one day it might trigger the memory of this post and my comment.
There's a reason why young workers are trampled over by bosses and highly desirable to management and that's because it's easier to coerce them, intimidate them, and to exploit their naivety than it is eoth older workers who are a bit wiser with this kind of stuff. And it's no accident that a job like this will give you rigorous training in food safety when it comes to documentation but they are either really vague about the laws and regulations ("Food safety is the law and it's everyone's responsibility - and that means it's your responsibility too!") or they completely omit any mention of this sort of stuff entirely. I've been in enough jobs in the food industry to know that this is a feature, not a bug.
So many of these businesses run on
hopes and dreamswage theft and code violations.
afaik listeria is not airborne? I don't think it is at least. The real risk was that with cheese you're creating a very hospitable environment for bacteria, of course to allow "good" bacteria to propagate which gives the cheese color and flavor. Listeria being introduced is bad enough, but in an environment like that listeria can really take over if they gain a foothold.
Listeria is pretty common though. It's often in soil and water (why it's important to wash vegetables and drink filtered clean water). I think it really has to be ingested though to cause issues. Nonetheless I always showered and washed my hair after coming home since I had that shit dripping on me.
