Justin: 0:00

I have been cussed out. I have been threatened. I mean, I've had people I'm pretty sure that they were gonna swing at me.

Dan: 0:08

Justin Dwyer has been a health inspector in Peoria, Illinois, for eleven years. Outright aggression like that from restaurant owners is pretty rare, and there are even some who welcome him. But there's still a tension that shapes every interaction Justin has on an inspection, down to the way he asks questions.

Justin: 0:30

We very much have to be detectives. When you walk in and you ask a question, you cannot ask leading questions. You have to ask open ended questions. So the question isn't, are you cooking that chicken to a 165 degrees?

Dan: 0:46

Right.

Justin: 0:47

The question is, hey, what temperature do you when they're, you know, taking the thermometer temp, you're like, hey, what temperature are you trying to reach with that?

Dan: 0:55

It's a small thing, but it matters. Because Justin isn't just there to catch violations, he's there to teach and he doesn't have much time to do it. For any given restaurant, he might only visit three times per year, maybe three hours per visit.

Justin: 1:11

So in the course of a year, I'm in an establishment for nine hours total, and that includes my time sitting somewhere just typing my inspection report. So making sure they understand the importance of what I'm trying to educate is really the... the push. You know, when I'm walking out of an establishment, I'm looking people in the eyes that are coming in to eat. When I leave, I genuinely wanna feel comfortable with what they're doing and that they're not gonna make people sick.

Dan: 1:52

I'm Dan Heath and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a deli owner, an Olympic bobsledder, a PR crisis manager. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Justin Dwyer what it's like to be a health inspector. We'll talk about what happened when one manager saw him coming and locked the door, why you should never wash your Thanksgiving turkey, and what happens when people try to bribe him? Stay with us. Justin told me that in a week he might do a dozen inspections if they're pretty simple. But a complex one might take all day because one site can have multiple licenses to serve food.

Justin: 2:46

Maybe a good example of that is at a grocery store, maybe they have five licenses. They've got, like, a prepared foods area or maybe, like, a small restaurant in there.

Dan: 2:55

Mhmm.

Justin: 2:55

And then they have a bakery, and they have a butchery, and they've got the floor, and maybe they have a coffee shop. Each one of those might have its own license. But to be as efficient as possible, I'm gonna try and do as much of that as I possibly can in one go because I am pulling staff away from their normal day to day operations as well.

Dan: 3:15

Many of Justin's inspections focus on restaurants. I asked if the restaurant owners got forewarning that he was coming.

Justin: 3:23

No. So our routine inspections are unannounced because we really want a true snapshot of what's going on in the establishment. So I'm gonna walk into an establishment and say, hello. My name is Justin Dwyer. I'm with Peoria City County Health Department, and I'm here for a routine inspection, or I'm here because we've received a complaint and I need to do an investigation.

Dan: 3:46

What's the worst reception you've ever gotten when you pulled up for an inspection?

Justin: 3:51

Oh, I pulled up for inspection. They ran to the door, locked it, and hid in the kitchen. I couldn't get in. They wouldn't let me in.

Dan: 3:59

So what happens?

Justin: 4:00

I just... I walked away. I've walked into inspections, and I'm like, I'm here for your inspection, and they'll go, nope.

Dan: 4:06

They'll just tell you no?

Justin: 4:08

Yep. So they do have a right to refuse.

Dan: 4:11

Well, what happens?

Justin: 4:13

It depends. You know, if they just say no, something weird is going on, or they're just gonna be like that. Sometimes it's, do we have to do this today? This really is a really bad day, which we do hear a lot. Trust me. Every day that I show up is the worst day ever for me to show up.

Dan: 4:31

Right.

Justin: 4:32

However, I have walked in, and I'm like, hey. I'm here for your inspection. And he's like, yeah. This isn't a good time. If you need to do it, you can. And I'll go, well, hey, you know, what's going on? And he goes, oh, well, the police just left. We just got robbed.

Dan: 4:47

Oh, dear.

Justin: 4:48

I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna come back another day. You got your hands full.

Dan: 4:51

But like the people that locked you out, like surely there's some consequence for that.

Justin: 4:56

Sadly, in some cases, no. Honestly, though, I just became a little sneakier. I just made sure that I parked in a place that they couldn't see me, bounced out of my car really fast the next time. And was through that front door before they could react.

Dan: 5:11

Oh, that's so good. So walk me through. Like, if we have a camera embedded in your head as you start to go around your inspection, like, what are we gonna see? What do you do and in what order?

Justin: 5:20

So, ideally, when we're conducting an inspection, I'm really looking at dynamic versus static. So I wanna go to the areas where the action is first. Things are not really changing in a dry storage room or in a walk in cooler. Where things are actually happening is on the cook line, in the server stations, and those are the first areas that I really start into. I'm gonna take temperatures. I'm gonna talk to staff. I'm gonna ask them questions about what temperature do you cook that burger to.

Dan: 5:52

So one of the first things you're looking for is food temperatures, which which makes sense. What are the other kind of first things on your agenda to take a look at?

Justin: 6:01

So we're looking at like sanitizer. So they have a properly concentrated sanitizer solution that they're gonna wipe surfaces down to verify the bacteria is being killed off. Is their dish machine working properly? And if for any reason it's off, I always try and give them like, hey. You know, can you reach out to your chemical supplier, your your maintenance guy, and see how quick they can get here? And if they can get it repaired while I'm here, I don't have to come back and do a follow-up inspection. I don't have to embargo it. I don't have to charge follow-up fees.

Dan: 6:34

Let's just run with the dishwasher scenario for a minute, because that's an interesting one where that's a real consequential problem, because every dish that goes through there that's not properly sanitized now becomes a problem. When you said embargo, does that mean that if you find, let's say a dishwasher is not heating properly, you kinda rope it off and say, you've gotta find another solution until this is fixed?

Justin: 6:55

Yeah. So essentially, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna alright. So you can't use this machine anymore. I need you to turn it off. Call a maintenance person to come out. If they're not able to be there or get there while I'm still at the establishment

Dan: 7:04

Mhmm.

Justin: 7:09

Then what we do is we we have under our ordinance power of embargo. I basically place a a tag on it that says it cannot be reused until it's been repaired, and I have come out to verify it functions properly, and I have released it for use again.

Dan: 7:26

This is great. Okay. Keep going on your tour. So we've done food temperature, we've done sanitizing, what else is on your list?

Justin: 7:32

So another big one, which is always happening throughout this entire process is I'm watching employees. The real question is, are they properly washing their hands? Are they making sure that they're cleaning things properly? Are they cleaning things in the right locations? You know, are they rinsing their knives off in the hand sink, which is a big no no. Hand wash sinks are only for hand washing because our concern is, you know, cross contamination.

Dan: 8:00

Is the manager of the store kinda walking with you as you do your inspection?

Justin: 8:05

So that can vary. Some managers are very hands on, some are not. Some just kind of like, okay, go do your thing and they don't care. Others are, you know, walking okay and we're having conversations. And in some cases, you wind up with an entourage. You might have five or six, seven people walking with you and all of them are, like, taking notes and watching what you're doing. But there have been inspections I've walked into, and they're like, oh, let's let's go take a look at the bar. Let's start at the bar.

Dan: 8:37

Right.

Justin: 8:37

You know, let's go to the, you know, this or that. Like, no. We're heading to the kitchen right now. That's a really bad red flag for me. Like, you're trying to keep me away from a space? Like, I'm a little concerned.

Dan: 8:50

Was there ever, like, a surprise factor that they were trying to keep you away from, like a bad surprise?

Justin: 8:55

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, equipment not working right. One of my favorites is I was training a new hire, and they were running all over. They were not prepared for us. And one of the cooks, like, came hustling by me with what we call date marking stickers. So product has to be date marked. It has to be indicated on when it was made because it only has a certain lifespan. We came running by me with a roll of date marked stickers heading to the walk in cooler, and I just reached out and took it out of his hand.

Dan: 9:25

He was trying to, like, just whip out a bunch of stickers, like, in the time before you open the door?

Justin: 9:31

Yeah. Yeah. He he was. He was.

Dan: 9:33

You gotta admire the hustle there. Yeah.

Justin: 9:35

Somehow, we got sidetracked. We were dealing with something even worse than whatever was going on in that walk in cooler. Well, by the time we got to the walk in cooler, somebody had got in there and date marked everything for that day. So today is the January 13. So it's literally like every single sticker says 01/13 on it.

Dan: 9:57

Only the freshest stuff in this establishment.

Justin: 10:00

And I'm looking around and I'm like, man, your payroll must be really, really high if you got this much food prepped at 11 o'clock in the morning. I'm like, you guys must have started at, like, 5AM. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We we start early every morning. Well, good. Now I know that next time I can come start my inspection at six and see you prepping.

Dan: 10:21

Mhmm.

Justin: 10:21

Oh, yeah. His eyes just light up like, oh, no. Like, he's gonna show up, and we're not gonna be here. I mean, you know, the simple fact is is, you know, we get lied to constantly. And we just understand, look. It's the name of the game. But at the end of the day, I'm just I'm just trying to protect the food safety. And if you can't do it right, well, I'm gonna mark you for it. Like, again, I'm not scared to mark violations. I will write violations all day long because not marking a violation is doing no one any good. It's not protecting the public, and it's basically just me turning a blind eye to something. So I very rarely have inspections where I have no violations. Okay. There's always something. No one is perfect, and I understand. I am not the inspector that's on my hands and knees in a flashlight looking under the stove. If I don't find something, I do not find something. I don't need to go hunt for things.

Dan: 11:16

Mhmm.

Justin: 11:16

I don't feel like I need to be that person.

Dan: 11:19

And how rare is just a shutdown?

Justin: 11:23

On average, I usually do a couple a year. It just kinda all depends on what's going on.

Dan: 11:28

Yeah. What were the worst conditions you've seen in a recent inspection?

Justin: 11:35

I recently just did it was actually, it was the worst inspection I've ever conducted.

Dan: 11:40

Really?

Justin: 11:41

Yeah. There were a total of 40 code section violations. I was there for five and a half hours.

Dan: 11:48

What kind of establishment was this?

Justin: 11:50

So this was a a restaurant. Okay. A normal sit down, you know, restaurant.

Dan: 11:54

Mhmm.

Justin: 11:55

But they had a lot of new staff. Staff didn't realize the things they were doing. We had a lot of training issues.

Dan: 12:01

Give us some details. Like, what what did you observe?

Justin: 12:04

Oh, so we had toxic chemicals that weren't properly stored. They were intermingled with food items. Oy. We had things that weren't properly date marked, so we didn't know how old the product actually was.

Dan: 12:18

Mhmm.

Justin: 12:19

We had a dish machine that wasn't working. We had blocked hand sinks. We actually when I walked into the kitchen, the kitchen floor was flooded with just like a layer of water all over it. And I'm like, hey, what's this water coming from? And they go, oh, yeah. Our sink is leaking. Well, their three compartment sink where they were doing all the prep. The pipe below it was actually broken. They had just wraps like cling wrap around it. But when you ran the water, it was still just pouring out onto the floor.

Dan: 12:55

Did you have to suspend service in that situation?

Justin: 12:58

So I did suspend service temporarily, like, on the cook line until they were able to clean everything up. They were able to have it cleaned up within ten minutes.

Dan: 13:09

And did the customers in the establishment become aware of any of this?

Justin: 13:14

No. The customers weren't aware. Most everything going on was is obviously behind the scenes in the kitchen. I do try and do my best to not interrupt service as much as I can. There have only been a few occasions over the years where customers became very aware that we were there as the health department. We were suspending service, and they were not gonna be receiving their food.

Dan: 13:40

Mhmm.

Justin: 13:40

But genuinely, I try not to make an establishment look bad. That's really not my goal.

Dan: 13:47

Do you think that the public would be shocked by the things that you've seen?

Justin: 13:53

Yes. I genuinely believe the public would be shocked. Now, that being said, I do believe with the onset of some very very well known like kitchen shows that show the worst of the worst in kitchens, maybe that has taken away some of the shock and awe. But I also believe that there's a certain mentality of that not in my backyard.

Dan: 14:21

Mhmm.

Justin: 14:22

Whereas, you know, that's a restaurant in a big city. That's not the restaurant that's happening in my small town that I go to every Friday night.

Dan: 14:30

Mhmm.

Justin: 14:31

And and sometimes I think they genuinely would be surprised at that.

Dan: 14:53

Justin says that managers try very hard to stay on his good side. Sometimes they try a little too hard. Some managers will try to give him a free meal but of course he can't take it. So he's learned to carry cash on him so he can leave money behind on the table if need be. So do you ever get offered just outright bribes to look the other way?

Justin: 15:16

I've never been directly, but there's definitely been hints of, you know, we we could take care of you. Now there are stories of other inspectors that have had gift cards shoved in their inspection bags.

Dan: 15:31

Oh, wow.

Justin: 15:32

Years ago, we did have an inspector that had a a wad of cash, like, pushed into his pocket. Woah. I mean, you know, some of those situations, we really can't do anything. And the best thing to do is you come back to the office, and you immediately go to your manager, and you turn over whatever it is, and you say, hey. This is what happened. We write a report, and then they're gonna handle the situation for you.

Dan: 16:01

Let's talk about the rules a little bit. I think this might be fun to delve into. What is something that you routinely enforce in restaurants and retail establishments that that people do wrong in their home kitchens all the time?

Justin: 16:16

Oh, the number one thing between home kitchens that we hear people do versus in restaurants is people washing meat. Anytime I do outreach and talk about, like, home food safety

Dan: 16:26

Mhmm.

Justin: 16:31

Especially around the holidays, Thanksgiving, you do not need to wash your turkey.

Dan: 16:40

Oh.

Justin: 16:41

It is actually more dangerous to wash your turkey than just leave it alone. Because turkey has bacteria on it, we already know. Washing it is not removing that bacteria. Cooking it removes that bacteria because the cooking process kills that bacteria. Washing it just splashes the bacteria all over your kitchen.

Dan: 17:06

While we're on this train of thought, can you resolve the age old debate? You order Domino's, you don't eat all the pizza but you forget to put it in the fridge, it's been sitting out on the counter all night, can you eat it the next day?

Justin: 17:18

Throw it away. Throw it away. So under the FDA code, restaurants are actually allowed to abuse food for certain amounts of time. So we call it time temperature control, and they can basically write a process that's you can abuse that product for up to four hours.

Dan: 17:40

What does abuse mean?

Justin: 17:41

So essentially, you can leave something that needs to be refrigerated or hot held in those proper temperature ranges, you can leave that sit out for up to four hours

Dan: 17:54

Okay.

Justin: 17:55

Before there's a genuine concern of bacteria growth where you just need to throw it away.

Dan: 18:00

Justin isn't responsible only for restaurant inspections. He also handles investigations of food borne illness. So for example

Justin: 18:10

Just a couple years ago, we ran into one. We started getting phone calls of people saying, you know, I I wasn't feeling good over the weekend. I was at this event on Friday night.

Dan: 18:21

So when the public health department starts getting these calls, it's not immediately clear why people are getting sick. Is it a batch of bad food? Is it a virus? So they have to investigate. And if they suspect a foodborne illness, the first thing they've got to do is figure out what was it that people ate, and not just on the day they got sick, but up to seventy two hours before they got sick.

Justin: 18:47

People always think it was the food that they just ate which is what made them sick.

Dan: 18:52

Yeah.

Justin: 18:53

However, you have to have incubation period. So a lot of things like the commonly known stomach flu or norovirus, that tends to have like a twelve to twenty four, sometimes up to forty eight hour incubation period.

Dan: 19:08

Mhmm.

Justin: 19:08

So you become sick really fast and you think, well, must have been the last thing I ate, but it actually was what you ate two days ago.

Dan: 19:17

Got it. And so if people are calling in, you're trying to kind of triangulate among their stories like just superimposing this person ate this and oh, there's overlap here. They both ate at this restaurant. What did they eat there? Is it that kind of thing?

Justin: 19:30

Yeah. Exactly. Basically, you're playing detective.

Dan: 19:34

So in this case, they do narrow it down to the event on Friday night. Justin's team reaches out to the caterer. They get the menu and then put together a survey for everybody who went to the event and not just the people who were sick.

Justin: 19:48

Because when we collect data, we wanna know the ill people's information but we also wanna know those that were not ill.

Dan: 19:56

Oh, that's a great point. So you have a a point of comparison.

Justin: 20:00

Yeah.

Dan: 20:01

So they got the survey back and noticed an odd pattern. People were saying one of the food items smelled.

Justin: 20:10

They said, oh, this specific product on the buffet line didn't taste right and it kinda like smelled weird.

Dan: 20:18

Never a good sign.

Justin: 20:19

But however, foodborne illnesses, traditionally bacteria and viruses don't have a smell. That's another home myth for you right there. You cannot smell E coli. You cannot smell salmonella.

Dan: 20:33

Eventually, they're able to pinpoint the offending food. Pulled pork. They went to the caterer's kitchen to figure out what had gone wrong.

Justin: 20:42

They were making very, very large batches of pork, like they were cooking two, three hundred pounds at a time. Shredding it all up, throwing it onto sheet trays, and just throwing it into the walk in cooler.

Dan: 20:57

Mhmm.

Justin: 20:58

And they didn't have a lot of room to allow that cold air around to properly cool. It was too thick. So our best guess was it was a cooling and then improper reheating process, which the number one bacteria associated with that is perfringens, Clostridium perfringens, which Clostridium perfringens also is the bacteria that has the association with a weird smell and taste.

Dan: 21:26

So it's kinda like a little murder mystery story, except instead of murder, it's gastrointestinal distress, and instead of a murderer, it's pulled pork. But impressive spade work all the same. So, Justin, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know, and what does it mean?

Justin: 21:56

Alright. So public health absolutely loves our alphabet soup and acronyms.

Dan: 22:02

Mhmm.

Justin: 22:02

One of the ones we bounce around and we use constantly in our office is called FBI.

Dan: 22:08

FBI?

Justin: 22:09

FBI is foodborne illness.

Dan: 22:11

Okay.

Justin: 22:12

So it's a short way of saying, I have a foodborne illness. I have to go do investigation. I need to figure out if there's any validity to somebody becoming sick. That's probably the big one that is very internal to food safety, but not really known outside of that.

Dan: 22:30

What is a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Justin: 22:35

We get lots of fun tools here and there, but most of them are pretty basic. But definitely, actually, my favorite time is when I get a brand new thermometer. And I I get to play with a brand new thermometer because, let's be honest, I don't know, I break one every year or two. I either drop it and it shatters or it just stops working because they really do get abused. But, yeah, I mean, there's nothing like a brand new shiny thermometer.

Dan: 23:01

And do you have a favorite thermometer model or brand?

Justin: 23:04

Yeah. I've had a couple, but it never fails that they stop manufacturing it about the time I break it and need a new one.

Dan: 23:11

What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a health inspector?

Justin: 23:16

Oh, do I really need to wash my hands?

Dan: 23:21

Surely, no one in this day and age still says that.

Justin: 23:25

I had a inspection a couple months ago. It was on a mobile food truck. It was extremely cold out. When I got there, all their water lines were frozen. They they couldn't do anything. And their handshake is bone dry. And I look at the gentleman and I said, when was the last time you wash your hands? And he looked at me square in the eyes and went, oh, we have gloves. And I'm like, proper handwashing is where we stop bacteria and we stop cross contamination. Gloves are just there to make sure we don't have bare hand contact and turn your hands into a utensil, but they are not a substitute for hand washing. And that was one of the examples where I immediately suspended the license without question.

Dan: 24:13

And that's what makes this a difficult job. It comes with real power. The power to shut down someone's livelihood and people don't respond well to that.

Justin: 24:23

It's that concept of, you know, I work for the government, I'm coming in, I am regulating. And, you know, the simple truth is some people just don't wanna be regulated. They do not want the cop following right behind them. They wanna drive whatever speed limit they want. They feel like they should be able to do whatever they would like to do, and they they don't like being told what they should do.

Dan: 24:45

Mhmm.

Justin: 24:46

And even as polite and courteous as you possibly can be, there are some people that just will never accept it.

Dan: 24:53

Yeah. I mean, what it seems like one of the the curses of your role, like a lot of public health jobs, is if you do your job really well, nothing happens. Right? No bad things happen. There's not a foodborne illness outbreak, and nobody gets sick from a restaurant's food, and so basically no one notices. Does that leave you feeling somewhat unappreciated or unrecognized?

Justin: 25:18

So a couple years ago, we had a big conference, and I I was one of the speakers there. And and I did an entire talk about we very much have a thankless job. At the end of the day, no news is good news for us.

Dan: 25:34

Yeah.

Justin: 25:35

And the simple fact is is when things go wrong, the first thing you hear is, well, where was the health department?

Dan: 25:42

Right.

Justin: 25:43

But when everything's going right, no one hears about us. We are in the shadows. We are no one realizes what we actually do and and the amount of work that goes into it and how we're there to protect the public. And I always joke that, you know, we're almost too good at what we do because people start forgetting about us, and they also start forgetting that, hey. You know, the funding for public health and, you know, food safety really needs to be there because it's important. When we're really good at our job, people forget about us.

Dan: 26:16

Amen. And and it's even more insidious than that. Like, if you're really successful, it becomes an argument against you. It's like, why are we spending all this money on on food inspections when there's hardly ever any problems with, foodborne illness? I mean, this is a this is a made up problem. It's like your very success at preventing problems becomes an indicator that maybe you're overinvesting in it when when actually the opposite is true, of course.

Justin: 26:40

Exactly. And I'll do a plug for one of my friends and colleagues. She's an author named Deborah Blum, and she wrote a a book called the poison squad. And it's all about the foundations of food safety back when chemicals were able to be added to food and food was able to be cut. So, you know, things like borax and other chemicals that you don't want in your food was actually allowed to be in your food because we didn't have food safety regulations. You know, you look at back at books like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and you look at the conditions of the meat packing company, all of those things rose to the knowledge of public health. And because of those things, we wound up with food safety regulations and public health. But behind the scenes, people don't see the continuous outbreaks, the continuous investigations. People don't realize how many different levels of food safety are in place to protect them.

Dan: 27:42

And to Justin, all of this effort is absolutely indispensable.

Justin: 27:48

It is a really important resource to regulate because out of everything you do every day, the two things you always do is you drink water and you eat food. And those are the two most important things to try and keep you from being sick.

Dan: 28:08

Justin Dwyer is a health inspector in Peoria, Illinois. Several years ago, I wrote a book called Upstream, the quest to solve problems before they happen. Check it out, by the way, if the concept intrigues you. I did narrate the audiobook. There's a link in the show notes. You're just one click away. Okay. Self promotion aside, one of the themes in the book is the thanklessness of preventive work like Justin mentioned. When was the last time you thought to yourself, thank goodness that when we ate out at that restaurant last weekend, we didn't get sick. There must have been a talented health inspector on duty. And meanwhile, not only are the benefits of the work largely invisible, the actual work itself often comes off as a nuisance. Most restaurant owners cringe when they see Justin coming. Some of them hide and lock the doors. And it's not just public health work that has this quality. Think of IT network security jobs where you get pestered to change your password frequently and it's so annoying until the whole network gets hacked and then we blame them for not stopping it. Some lucky jobs actually get both, the prevention and the rescue. Remember the ocean lifeguard episode? Most of his work was about prevention, anticipating which swimmers might get themselves in trouble and being there just in the nick of time to keep them safe. But from time to time, he also saves lives and he sees the face of the person he helps. Justin never gets that. He'll never know who didn't get sick because of his work. He has to be content with the quiet satisfaction of ensuring that the people who cook your food are playing by the rules. Asking open ended questions to reveal the truth, checking food temperatures and sanitation protocols, dealing with hostile owners, and working to keep community members safe as they eat and drink. Folks, that's what it's like to be a health inspector. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.