Having an illegal business gives you the right to poison people? Most of the illegal eateries don’t know shit about food hygiene … they just cook up grandma’s recipe and hey they become famous … and than customers don’t give a darn where they eat, most Taiwanese don’t even care when there are running rats in the back of the place … seen with my own eyes …
But, they care about their toilet seat … even on a clean one they go up and squat … 
[quote=“TainanCowboy”]
What horse shit. Do you have any idea about the Hepatitus scourge on this island?
Do you know that 10,000+ children on this island die every year due to
hepatitis and liver dis-function diseases?
Fuck “Mom & Pop” if they are spreading disease.[/quote]
Always knew some evangelical cowboy samaritan would start some emotive “Oooh, what about the CHILDREN!” screeching. I have as much compassion for the “poor suffering CHILDREN!” as the next person, but that is ultimately a non-issue.
IF YOU THINK IT’S UNSANITORY, DON’T EAT THERE! DUH! OH, THE POOR CHILDREN!
[quote=“jimipresley”]I have as much compassion for the “poor suffering CHILDREN!” as the next person, but that is ultimately a non-issue.
IF YOU THINK IT’S UNSANITARY, DON’T EAT THERE! DUH! OH, THE POOR CHILDREN![/quote]
Ouch. Don’t post in caps, please. It’s not nice.
As for your argument, I don’t think it holds water. If I take my kid to a restaurant that is open to the public, I am assuming that the food is fit for public consumption. I am assuming that the hygiene is compliant to standards, and that it is safe for me to eat there. It doesn’t matter if it’s a T.G.I. Fridays, an Alleycat’s Pizza, or a beef noodle joint at the night market. Public health endangerment shouldn’t be a caveat emptor issue when it comes to eating out, which is precisely why every civilized country has laws regulating food & beverage industries. Your laissez-faire approach exists only in third world nations, and we know what public health is like in those places. 
I’m with Jimi on this one. Free choice rules. If you want a fascist health inspection bureaucracy, why don’t you go home. In six years of eating greasy, cockroach-infested food I’ve never been sick. Growing up among European restaurateurs I can tell you the difference is you can actually see what goes on in the kitchen here, whereas in the west, the going ons are hidden but the same shit happens. Drop a piece of steak on the floor, no problem, customer didn’t see. Chef didn’t wash his hands after going to the toilet, who would know anyway?
Hygiene freaks are a bunch of fascists who apply the same logic to racial purity and sick OCD Calvinist work ethics. Let’s ban dancing and tobacco and goose step together. An increase in policing your food will reduce variety and convenience while increasing the costs to the consumer. Then Taiwan will be just like home for a lot of you: A fascist state set up for your own safety where nobody can start a business unless they are already rich.
My dear Mr Phillips. You succinctly defined my opinon on this matter with clarity and incisefulness. 
Ouch. Mr Maoman. Don’t post in italics, please. It’s not nice.
Well … for every one salmon 'onella then … no, health inspection doesn’t have to be bureaucratic … it should be fair and safe guard customers from being harmed … I had my kitchen inspected and the ‘inspectrice’ just had her jaws fall open because she never saw a cleaner kitchen in her career … oh, BTW … clean kitchen doesn’t mean free of roaches and rats … these critters visit kitchens whenever they feel like in Taiwan, it’s not straight forward to fight them in the Taiwan ‘setting’ … of dirty, filthy restaurants … especially when you have one of those next doors …
Anyways, anyone is free to choose where to eat … I’ve eaten in the filthiest places when I first came to Taiwan in the early nineties … but I can expect that by now people here are more hygiene conscious … but it proofs not to be the case for many …
[quote=“Deuce Dropper”]
This whole thread is retarded, Taiwan is one generation removed from the days when everyone lived in filth and the cities were giant toilets.
It will take at least another generation clean up every little restaurant, we certainly don’t need a bunch of uppity whities doing their ‘civic duty’ and putting small business owners out of business.
Like Elvis Hendrix alluded to, do the eye ball test, if it looks nasty, move on.[/quote]
The fact that there is a telephone line willing to handle such complaints and government agencies that will follow up on them points out the falsity of this viewpoint.
It may take a generation, but if no one ever says anything it will never happen. The “uppity whites” in question live here as well and have as much a stake as anyone else in seeing positive change here.
[quote=“Tempo Gain”]
The fact that there is a telephone line willing to handle such complaints and government agencies that will follow up on them points out the falsity of this viewpoint.
It may take a generation, but if no one ever says anything it will never happen. The “uppity whites” in question live here as well and have as much a stake as anyone else in seeing positive change here.[/quote]
So Taiwan should become a nanny police state like the UK where your civil liberties are annulled and your every movement and decision is dictated to you?
Right’s should not infringe on others’ rights.
Poisoning people is not a civil right.
I have my rights annulled everyday, those days I go outside anyway, by people who think it’s their right to not give a damn about anyone.
You still haven’t answered if you’ll be happy to see me dead, because your posts make it pretty clear you wouldn’t care if I was alive or dead.
[quote=“Tempo Gain”][quote=“Deuce Dropper”]
This whole thread is retarded, Taiwan is one generation removed from the days when everyone lived in filth and the cities were giant toilets.
It will take at least another generation clean up every little restaurant, we certainly don’t need a bunch of uppity whities doing their ‘civic duty’ and putting small business owners out of business.
Like Elvis Hendrix alluded to, do the eye ball test, if it looks nasty, move on.[/quote]
The fact that there is a telephone line willing to handle such complaints and government agencies that will follow up on them points out the falsity of this viewpoint.
It may take a generation, but if no one ever says anything it will never happen. The “uppity whites” in question live here as well and have as much a stake as anyone else in seeing positive change here.[/quote]
yes and no, us ‘uppity whities’ are for the most part seasoned travelers and we all know the rules of how to dine. If you can see them cook it, if there is a crowd, it is likely safe, if it looks nasty walk away. Personally I gave up the ‘shit in a tray’ merchants a long time ago, and if foreigners insist on eating at the nastiest of the nasty then they get what they deserve.
I like to think Darwin wins in this game. Dumb people make stupid decisions and get sick, bad restaurants fade into extinction or over time lose their business to cleaner, modern establishments. Survival of the fittest.
The Chinese have been living in filth for 5000 years, do you honestly think you can fix it with a few complaints? Go to a Chinatown in a big Western city, it is a festering sewer with garbage piled high everywhere and grime on the sidewalks. That is just how they roll.
Regarding the tainted milk, stop me if I am wrong, but that had nothing to do with restaurant hygiene, so please stop referring to that as your main argument.
Exactly. Mind your own business.[/quote]
When they serve me a meal with a cockroach in it, it BECOMES my business. Mine, and not yours, so since you’re on it, why don’t you go mind yours?
It wasn’t in Taiwan, but I got food poisoning a number of years back. Not the type that gives you a few days off work – but the type that imprints itself on your life. I was poisoned by an ignorant fuckwit food vendor that didn’t give his nasty grubby ways a second thought.
I’d been out for dinner when I started feeling pretty ill. No big deal at first but I got progressively worse over the following day leading to me being cramped up with diarrhea, fever and vomiting – all the usual and nasty stuff. On the 2nd day I started shitting blood and that was my cue to get to hospital.
They and I couldn’t believe the way I looked. I couldn’t be given any aggressive medication though as they didn’t yet know which bacteria was to blame (the obvious suspects were salmonella and e coli). They explained that to give the wrong antibiotics would complicate things further. A day later the results came back showing I had a rampant case of Salmonellosis. By this stage I was a fucking mess. Fever ridden, dehydrated, shitting congealed blood, vomiting, chocking on a swollen tongue and squirming in abdominal pain. If ever I had wanted to die it was then.
The medication was started and it took 3 days before I could untwist myself and get some rest. It took a further week before I was back on my feet. I’d lost 8KG and felt like a wreck. The doctors later told me I could have died if the bacteria had gone unchecked and taken hold in my blood. To this day my guts have never fully recovered. I still get severe cramps here and there; due mainly to the lining of my intestine being pitted by the infection and now harboring new and frequent infections. According to the doctor my guts will never fully recover.
Based on my own experiences, no food vendor (rich, poor, uneducated, whatever) should ever expect any type of immunity when it comes to basic food hygiene. If they cut corners and get caught out they should accept the consequences. Poisoning someone is no joke and it doesn’t make any difference that we are in Taiwan. I say report the fuckers – especially if there is an obvious sign like seeing a cockroach into your food. That or go shit in their water tanks and see how they like it.
Maybe the latter part of this post will get a bit of topic but some of what I have to say should be of some interest to someone.
As a restaurant owner I have experienced the hygene checks from the health department. To the best of my knowledge they usually only come in respones to “customer” complaints. The WeiShengJu (health bureau?) were NOT unreasonable people to deal with. They came in without warning and showed their ID, and came into the kitchen etc. They checked things like the condition of food in refrigerators, cleanliness arround refrigerator seals, plates that were obviously waiting to be used etc. Because we were operating and busy enough (at least when I have experienced this here) they did not get worried about the fact that the bench tops or floor were far from spotless (if any restaurant tells you they always are in their place, I can tell you they have no business or are lying). To this end these inspections were more logical to me than what I experienced when I worked in a restaurant in a certain western country and we had to have the place spotless once a month, knew when that was going to happen and it was not during opening hours so they did not get a real view of how things were actually done most of the time.
The flip side is that so many complaints are not really from customers at all, but in true Taiwan style competitors whose business is not doing too well, so they try to run the opposition into the ground by giving them problems by reporting them to every government bureau they can. I once had someone report me to the tax department every day for a month. I don’t really have any objection to the health bureau people if they are reasonable to deal with, which in my experience they were. The tax department I have delt with many people who were fine (eg they came and checked that we did give recipts to them) but I once encountered one woman from the tax department who to me bordered on insane. Our turnover on 2 days of the same weekend was different by a factor of about 10 which she claimed was impossible. I pointed out that the day with the high turnover was a day with very good weather and the other day was a typhoon day. Our restaurant is in a scenic location, but not exactly near where many people live. Anyway the tax department genius tried to argue about this even when I was able to prove this about the weather and said to her would you come to our place on a typhoon day if you were coming as a normal customer? (she did admit they would not). She was basically pushing me hard to admit to having avoided tax and paying a fine (which I refused to). I pushed hard on it because I thought I was in the right, and eventually won because she had no proof of any wrong doing which did not exist anyway, but I can see how reporting could be used against businesses here with unreasonable effects too.
I think at least 0.1% of all customers are pretty much insane (last week a customer told me that he could see I must be a white supremisist, not because of something I said, but because of ummm the look in my eyes… yes, a guy who has chosen to live here for more than 10 years and speaks Chinese, just who you would think would be a potential KKK member) and Taiwanese are not unknown to try to destroy the competitors in every way they can think of, sooner or later all businesses get some complaints. Then of course the relevant government bureaus need to do some proper investigating when applying laws in response to complaints. Whilst I have yet to experience anything like this in regards to health inspections the tax department did leave me worried as to what the effect could be if I came up against a health inspector who was rather unreasonable.
What you and jimi fail to grasp is that Taiwan does have sanitation laws, and the accompanying bureaucracy to enforce them. That bureaucracy at least partially relies on the populace to notify them when illegal, unsanitary conditions have been spotted. Perhaps it is you who should leave Taiwan for a third world country without enforced standards.
As I’m sure you’re aware, that statement is not statistically significant. The vastly lower rates of food-borne illnesses in countries with enforced sanitation standards versus those without are.
A question for the restaurateurs:
Is there a health code standard/guideline/requirement stipulating that dishes must be washed/rinsed in water above a specified temperature?
What horse shit. Do you have any idea about the Hepatitus scourge on this island?
Do you know that 10,000+ children on this island die every year due to
hepatitis and liver dis-function diseases?
Fuck “Mom & Pop” if they are spreading disease.[/quote]
Hepatitis is definitely the one to worry about. It’s not in anyway as prevalent as it once was but as a simple rule don’t eat anything from the night market that is not served on disposable plates. Another idea would be to bring your own chopsticks and utensils when eating.
No idea if there is such a law as to what temperature should be used to clean dishes. However sure that nobody cares about it as some pretty big restaurants clean dishes sort of outside in the back yard with a garden hose. I think that regardless what the rules, laws, regulations are, there are certainly not enough checks if establishments follow those. Hygenic standards in Taiwan are for a developed country, very low. We do not even need to go as far as nightmarkets. Small Pubs clean beer glasses with cold water behind a darkish bar counter and big sea-food restaurants, as said earlier. Pile up huge dishes for a bloke in yellow rubber boots to sort of hose them at the end of the day outside. So call that hot line, make does government employees busy, as a restaurateur that cares about hygene a lot, I would be delighted to see more inspections. As on the tax inspections, same thing happened to us at the Tavern-Premier and we had to explain that the football world cup does only happen once every four years but then one has supplier invoices to back this.
Now wait just a billy-fried minute, that’s not true, in fact-oh, it says Chef, not, uh, OK, forget it…
My favourite 18th century Highland joke:
Ach, and d’ye ken why the Calvinists forbid yeh teh shag standin’ oop?
They’re afraid it’ll lead teh dancin’…