From the time I was seven months old until I was sixteen years old, I lived in North Carolina. While my opinions on the state as a whole vary from day to day (with the exception of my unwavering belief that it is the superior Carolina), the one thing I changed my mind the most since leaving is the sanitation scores that hang in restaurants.
Sanitation scores ruined my life.
I thought when I was younger that seeing in every restaurant in the state the large, white piece of paper with a bolded letter and a number grade to the right when I walked in would give me peace of mind. After all, who wouldn’t want to know that the establishment they’ve chosen to eat at had been prepared as hygienically as possible?
It was easy to scoff at a restaurant with anything lower than an A rating of 91. If the fast food giants like Cook Out and Chick-Fil-A could consistently hit the high 90s, or dare I say it, shoot past the 100s, then why couldn’t the fancy sit-down restaurants?
If any restaurant slipped past the A rating, then frankly, in my mind, they should cease to exist.
It was heartbreaking, the few times when we walked into our favorite Mexican restaurant and saw that the latest inspection by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services deemed that the sanitary procedures of the place fell short of the A ranking.
It felt sickening to eat food that was likely plagued by harmful bacteria and pathogens. Why else would they be given a B of an 88 if not just for that? Were there roaches infesting the walls or rats hiding out in the pantry?
Maybe they should be shut down, just to play it safe.
For sixteen years, these grades determined where we ate, how we ate, and if we somehow happened into a place that had the B hanging from their window or wall, how we talked about our dinner after leaving.
Then, I moved.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t have such a loud notice telling me, supposedly, how cleanly the food I was eating had been prepared. I was paranoid at first. How could I know that the Chili’s in MegaMall was safe to eat?
Miraculously, I survived my two years without unmistakeable sanitation scores. When I moved to Virginia after graduating high school, I once again did not have the benefit of a white piece of paper telling me whether or not the food was safe to eat. And when I moved to Michigan, I still could not let my guard down.
But after years and years away from the system, I began to realize I wasn’t even thinking about a restaurant’s cleanliness anymore.
The fears of what could happen if I dined at a place with a B or an 88 rating completely washed away. Food was food.
There were places I found myself frequenting that I know sixteen-year-old Mitchell never would have had they been judged by North Carolina standards, and it didn’t matter.
I also began to realize the way North Carolina judged restaurants’ sanitation wasn’t as cut-and-dried as whether food was being stored properly and employees were or were not washing their hands.
Do I now think states should stop inspecting restaurants? No, of course not. But for people like me who overly obsessed over these scores and let it rule where and what I ate, not knowing the percentages has given me much more peace of mind.
Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.
