Once you frequent the streets of the capital and its environment at night it will quickly become apparent to you that the number of vendors offering an assortment of home-cooked dishes for sale, has increased significantly in recent years. The phenomenon is clearly market-driven. The expansion of the local entertainment industry as reflected in the frequent startup of new night clubs and beer gardens has created a demand for this type of service. True, there are a few more up-market restaurants and fast food facilities around, but roadside cooking provides a cheaper and – some may argue – no less tasty option.
In a recent interview with this newspaper an official of the City Public Health Department alluded to the phenomenon of the night-time roadside food vendors and the extent to which they comply with public health regulations. His was not a doom and gloom assessment though he pointed out that the absence of night-time monitoring by the department meant that vendors might be much more inclined to provide patrons with sub-standard service.
Some owners and managers of urban places of entertainment allow vendors immediately outside their premises only if what they offer patrons conforms – at least as far as they can tell – to certain standards; hence the advent of accoutrement like caps and aprons and the use of disposable utensils rather that plates and cups washed in water recycled many times over.
By its own admission, the municipality’s Health and Sanitation Department has its own limitations including limited enforcement powers as far as imposing sanctions against delinquent vendors. The other consideration, of course, is that food vending has become a substantive form of employment for persons not employed in the formal sector and a mechanism for subsidising modest incomes in other cases.
The danger, however, reposes in the fact that some food vendors are much more likely to transgress the public health regulations by night than by day. For example, many of those vendors who run small, occasional operations from roadside stands in villages where they reside are unlikely to possess Food Handlers Certificates. In some instances utensils are washed in recycled water and food is kept unheated until the entire lot is sold out.
While the City Public Health Department says it conducts regular health education programmes for vendors, the difficulty reposes in the fact that those programmes only cover those vendors who have applied for and secure certificates which clear them to conduct that type of business. There are others who do so unknown to the authorities and whose methods of food preparation may not, in many cases conform to the required standards. These are not issues that come to national attention very often, though circumstances dictate that they be taken more seriously. It is likely, for example, that some food preparation takes places under less than sanitary conditions, where, for example, there is no running water, no protection against flies and other vermin and where, in some instances, there are no cold storage facilities. When these conditions are coupled with concerns over the prevalence of communicable diseases, there exists a clear case for doing more. First, to reach more of the vendors and seek to ensure their compliance with food-safety regulations. Second, to make patrons more aware of the importance of being mindful of which vendors they patronize. Indeed, there are cases, where the risks of food poisoning extend beyond roadside vendors and into some established snackettes, a circumstance to which this newspaper pointed several months ago.
It does no harm, we believe, to restate the point that while we believe that every encouragement should be given to small business enterprises – as much in the food sector as in any other sector – such encouragement must be attended by measures that seek to ensure the public health regulations are upheld and that consumer protection is, as far as possible, assured.
