The Ethics of Red Tape

Here’s a slippery slope argument of exactly the sort that make me grateful it isn’t my responsibility to sort out slippery slope questions: Earlier this year, the City of Houston shut down a local couple’s ongoing program to feed the homeless people in downtown, on the grounds that they didn’t have a permit to prepare food for public consumption. Like most major cities in the US, Houston had a variety of health codes intended to ensure that anyone making and selling food is using sanitary equipment and utensils, proper refrigeration temperatures, food that hasn’t gone bad and so on. Of necessity, this same standard is applied to school cafeterias, company lunchrooms, and any other food service operation, including those of a charity or non-profit nature. History shows us that without such laws, people can and will offer unsafe food products for sale, and charities will almost certainly offer free food of a dubious nature from time to time. Unfortunately, this same set of ordinances does apply to a grass-roots meals program…

You can read the original story here if you want to, but the basic gist of the story is that a young couple in Houston was gathering and preparing enough meals for 60 to 120 people each night for over a year before the City government got wind of it and forced them to stop, on the grounds that the food was not prepared in a certified facility, they didn’t have a certified food manager in charge, and similar issues. The meals program didn’t have any of these things because it wasn’t an all-up soup kitchen or rescue mission; just a couple of people who already ran a non-profit group doing youth outreach who had decided to distribute some leftover food that various people and businesses had made available. They’re currently working on linking up with a non-profit group or friendly business that does have the appropriate permits, and may eventually be able to resume operations, but I think the underlying question is still worth taking a moment to consider…

No one is saying that food service operations should not be overseen by the appropriate government agencies, or that non-profit groups should be exempted from those standards for food safety. The potential for abuse on the for-profit side alone is unthinkable (e.g. companies using donations of questionable food products to gain tax benefits), and the idea of well-meaning but unqualified volunteers accidentally causing harm through the distribution of unsafe food is nearly as bad. Yet, by the same token, telling people that they can’t take leftover food donated by a restaurant at closing time and give it to people who are hungry seems heartless – especially when we consider that anything worth salvaging will probably be removed from the garbage and eaten by the same people later anyway. There are also liability issues involved, as anyone harmed in this way could potentially sue whoever they imagine has wronged them, including the city for allowing an unregulated food operation to continue in the first place…

So how should the city resolve this question? Should they allow the meals program to continue, or stand firm on their regulations? Could they find a way to certify the food providers in our story as qualified to gauge the safety or quality of food offerings (assuming they actual are qualified to do that), or require the people involved to indemnify the city as blameless (e.g. you can’t sue them) where acceptance or use of these food items is involved? Could any of the other non-profit groups that already attempt to feed and shelter homeless people provide this program with the facilities and support they need to get their permits? Or would it be better for all parties involved if our good Samaritans just gave their support (and food, where applicable) to an established charity with a certified kitchen and food manager already in place?

It’s worth thinking about…