Eats
Food vendors will have to make the grade
BY GABE HERMAN
Is that street meat clean to eat? Until now, New
Yorkers could only wonder about the cleanliness
of street food, or perhaps choose not to think
about it at all. But the city has started a grading program
for all 5,500 food carts and trucks across the
boroughs, which will give out letter grades in a twoyear
process, similar to the rollout for restaurant letter
grades in 2010.
The program started last month. In the announcement
in November, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city Department
of Health commissioner, said, “Letter grades
on food carts and trucks will help New Yorkers see
how these businesses fared on their latest inspection,
right when they want to place an order. Just as diners
appreciate letter grading in restaurants, we expect
this program to be popular among customers of food
carts and trucks.”
The idea of grading food carts and trucks has been
supported by the industry. In 2017, Ben Goldberg,
founder and C.E.O. of the New York Food Truck Association,
said, “At the NYFTA, we think food trucks
should be held to the same food-safety regulations as
brick-and-mortar restaurants, not only including letter
grades, but also addressing the onerous food-safety
permitting process for food truck employees.”
The new D.O.H. program stems from a city law
passed in 2017. The issue was also reviewed in the
state Senate that year, and the Independent Democratic
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keeping foods at improper temperatures, not
wearing a hair restraint and not keeping equipment
clean.
The new program is facing some criticism, however,
related to D.O.H. attaching a location-sharing
device to every vendor’s cart or truck, which the department
said will be used to fi nd vendors when inspection
time comes.
The advocacy group Street Vendor Project tweeted
after the announcement, “While vendors getting letter
grades is good for everyone, tracking vendors’
movements with GPS devices could have severe consequences
for our mostly immigrant communities.”
The Health Department said it will delete location
data within 24 hours, “protect data during transmission
and storage,” and only request location data at
the time of inspection.
The department said it will hold workshops in the
coming months for food vendors about the new grading
process and how to handle food properly and
avoid violations.
The vendor-grade law’s prime sponsor, Councilmember
Karen Koslowitz, said when the program
was announced, “New York is known around the
world for the amazing diversity of its street food,
ranging from halal hot dogs to curry in a hurry. But
everyone celebrating that diversity has a right to know
that it meets uniform health standards, and the Health
Department is right to implement a letter grading system
for food carts and trucks to help assure that those
standards are met.”
PHOTO BY GABE HERMAN
A food-vendor’s cart on Central Park West outside
the American Museum of Natural History.
Conference, a group in the state Senate, released
an analysis of city data from 2016 inspections
of food carts and trucks that was not made public.
That report showed that eight vendors would have
received the abysmal “C” health grade. Five of those
eight were located in Manhattan, including four in
Midtown and one on the Upper West Side.
Manhattan vendors were found to have the highest
rate of health infractions, at 1.17 violations per
inspection. Citywide, the most common violations included
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