Slashdot Mirror
Yelp Reviews Help NYC Health Department Find and Close Dirty Restaurants
An anonymous reader writes with news about a study that investigated the effectiveness of Yelp reviews in pinpointing the source of foodborne illnesses. "In 2012, New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) found that residents weren't turning to the city's free 311 service to make such complaints, but rather they were reporting their experiences in Yelp reviews. So the CDC, in collaboration with the New York City DOHMH, Yelp, and Columbia University, conducted a nine-month long research into the effectiveness of using online reviews to identify sources of foodborne illnesses. The study discovered 468 actionable complaints, 97% of which hadn't been officially reported to the city, and analyzed roughly 294,000 Yelp restaurant reviews. Subsequent investigations on suspected restaurants turned up evidence of bare-handed food handling, cross-contamination, or even the presence of mice and cockroaches. The study concluded that providing the public with more options for reporting complaints about restaurants, particularly in the social media sphere, would help in the identification and possible closure of sources of foodborne illnesses."
For others who, like me, did not know what the "CDC" was, it is "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention".
Subsequent investigations on suspected restaurants turned up evidence of bare-handed food handling, cross-contamination, or even the presence of mice and cockroaches.
Subsequent investigations? That says to me that the initial investigation was much like a typical NYC building inspection. The "inspector" drives up to the business, glances around the front of the building, then tells you which pile of building materials they would like dropped off in their driveway before signing off.
Perhaps they should do their jobs which would result in finding things like mice and cockroaches, if not bare-handed food handling. Without that, my favorite solution to dirty restaurants (forcing them to post their health report in the front window, or in the same glass box as their menu) has no viability. Like public health, it depends on public health employees doing their jobs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot (One Star): Don't eat here! Most of the patrons and staff smelt of B.O., like they had been working for days on some late night software project. None of them had shaved or bathed in days. Food came directly out of a vending machine down the hall, same for the beverage choices. Menu items included Pop Tarts, Doritos, Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper. When I complained about the 3 inch roach in the break room I was told, "That's our mascot, Chubby."
I guess the big benefit here, is that very little human labor, on the part of the city, or the citizens, is required to find the suspicious restaurants. That suggests that having computers spy on people is more productive than having a web site to deal with customer complaints.
Bare-handed food handling is fine to me, as a consumer. If we're not talking about a cashier handling your money, then walking over to the food line to get your order ready, as long as people are washing their hands regularly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Keeping the sick employees home without them being afraid of calling in and getting fired seems to be a greater issue.
Rubber foodservice gloves are not magical, and using them does not instantly and permanently make your hands clean. The cleanliness problem in restaurants has very little to do with bacteria that comes directly from humans, it's cross contamination between cooked and uncooked foods. If I handle raw chicken with my gloves, then use those same gloves to put together your sandwich, the sandwich will be covered in bacteria from the raw chicken.
I worked in food service for years, and this is a legitimate problem, and gloves tend to make it worse. Most restaurants are staffed with immigrants, many of whom come from countries and cultures with vastly different sanitation standards. In restaurants that force everyone to wear gloves, those people tend to put on a pair of gloves when they get to work, and take off that same pair at the end of the day. I've seen cooks go to the bathroom wearing gloves, smoke a cigarette wearing gloves, eat their lunch wearing gloves, and so on. If you don't force people to wear gloves but instead enforce a very detailed handwashing policy, things tend to be much more sanitary.
This sounds like a good idea to me. But if they are going to start using social media, why not take it one step further and actually post their inspections as "reviews" on Yelp? Send tweets out when they shut a place down. ("Shutting down @LaSemonlia for falsely labeling as "Chicken Quesadilla" their cucaracha surprise. #NoBueno")
I know that restaurants have a love hate relationship with Yelp. They fear the petulant customer who will give them a bad yelp review because the restaurant didn’t kiss their feet. But I think that 99% of yelp reviewers know to ignore the occasional crap review knowing that it says more about the reviewer than the restaurant. So now the actually bad restaurant does have even more to fear from yelp. Back when I read my local newspaper and I noticed that some doctor had lost their licence I would check the rate my doctor site and see that in all but for a single doctor the reviews were typically, “Where did they get their licence? A cracker jack box?” or “A complete quack, I went in with a horribly sore leg after a ski accident and the bozo diagnosed me with heavy metal poisoning. I went to emerge and they said my leg was broken.” My only worry is that like slashdot, reddit, tripadvisor, and other voting sites that this will just be one more reason for evil companies to hire slimy PR firms to “manage” their reputations and the reputations of their competitors. More information by and for the public is only a good thing.
The problem with using yelp reviews is some of the reviews are fake. Yelp staffers have been known to write negative reviews for companies that don't pay yelp.
The yelp reviews provide a suggestion that there may be a problem; there is a health inspector who examines the restaurant based on the suggestion. If it's a fake yelp review and the restaurant does meet the standard, then the health inspector gives a good grade and there's no problem. On the other hand, if there's a fake yelp review and the restaurant does have problems--well, the restaurant deserves the failing grade; the false yelp review just gets the inspector there sooner than the normal review cycle.
Those don't sound like serious violations, they sound like things you can find anywhere if you just look hard enough. I can see bare-handed handling and cross-contamination happening anywhere, and you'd pretty much need a hermetically sealed room to avoid mice and cockroaches in NYC.
How they should've done the study is mine Yelp for actionable complaints. Then send inspectors to those restaurants and an equal number of restaurants chosen at random without the inspectors knowing which set the restaurant belonged to. Then they could check to see if there was any statistical difference in inspection results between the Yelp-flagged set and the random set.
Otherwise you're just serving up a heaping of confirmation bias. The idea of using online reviews to detect food-borne outbreaks by mining review sites is a good one, but it still needs to be properly vetted in a double-blind study.