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> A local baker wouldn't do well by giving customers food poisoning by slacking on hygiene. Even absent regulation customers would stop visiting for daily lunch
by michaelt 2y ago
> A local baker wouldn't do well by giving customers food poisoning by slacking on hygiene. Even absent regulation customers would stop visiting for daily lunches after a while.
Historically this wasn't really the case, as I understand things.
Obviously if your hygiene standards were so low that every customer got ill immediately every time, that would be easily detected.
But if you just overlook the occasional rat droppings in the flour sack, or put the occasional handful of sawdust to bulk out the sausage filling? So one or two customers get sick per month? And they were sickly people anyway, people in good health can shrug such things off? And every food vendor is similarly bad, so it's always plausible something else got them sick?
It would be pretty hard for that to get traced back to you.
- spacebanana7 2y agoYeah there're a few embedded assumptions in my example in addition to regular custom. It needs to be clear to the consumer that the baker was the source of the food poising, the baker needs to get enough revenue from regular customers to offset the temptation of cheating occasional customers by making the kitchen low hygiene, and the cost of making the place hygienic needs to be reasonable. > Historically this wasn't really the case, as I understand things A modern counterexample is the street food vendors in New Dehli, where regulatory enforcement is lax and food poising is frequent. I suspect this is because big cities have more occasional customers but other factors probably come into play as well.