While I can attest that you can have a lot of fun with a Kitchen Nightmares binge, it’s hard not to be a little paranoid about the restaurants you visit after see Gordon Ramsay comb through gunk-covered kitchens and freezers for long enough.
And although we all have our favorite places to eat, the unfortunate reality is that you never truly know what an unfamiliar restaurant is going to have in store for you. After all, looks can be deceiving and it’s entirely possible to be perfectly fine after eating at a hole-in-the-wall place only to end up getting food poisoning from a eatery that seemed much fancier.
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But as one woman recently made clear on TikTok, there is a way to avoid the riskiest places that could’ve been under our noses all along.
On June 28, TikTok user @7semykittens made a video in which she described her job as a health inspector.
As she put it, “I inspect every single place that sells food, from supermarkets to food trucks.”
When one of those places doesn’t meet regional health standards, she issues a penalty notice, which then goes on a public database.
This database not only keeps track of which restaurants and other “food shops” received a penalty notice, but includes details of how those notices were resolved.
As you can see in this video, she cautions us to take particular note of any violation that resulted in a prosecution, as the places who experience this punishment are considered the most serious threats to public health.
Of course, if you watch that TikTok, you’ll quickly notice that the database she shows off seems very specific to Australia.
Fortunately, the health inspector made a follow-up video in which she found that similar databases exist in the United States.
The only difference is that they’re organized on a county-by-county basis, so she recommends googling “food inspection reports” with the name of your county included if you want to see what’s going on in your area.
As she said, “You guys have access to every food shop inspection that has been done.”
And much like the Australian database she showed off, she said that the American databases she’s seen also included the penalty that violators received in their reports.
And @7semykittens made sure to stress what valuable resources these databases can be, as food safety isn’t something you want to leave up to chance as a customer.
In her words, “Believe me when I tell you health inspectors do not penalize lightly. Treat this as a survival hack.”
