A closer look at the New South Wales Food Authority name and shame register (that’s in Australia) reveals restaurants serving Chinese cuisine are by far the most frequent food safety offenders.

Inspectors have handed out 198 penalty notices, for everything from filthy kitchens to cockroach infestations, to Chinese restaurants since November 2009 - twice as many as for any other nationality. Indian restaurants received 99 fines, Thai 87, Italian/pizzerias 83, Japanese 66 and Vietnamese, 24. Modern Australian, Korean, Lebanese, American, Turkish and Pakistani restaurants rounded out the state's 12 most culpable cuisines.

Some restaurants are listed more than once on the register, either for repeat offences or because an inspection found multiple breaches. Food safety coach and industry consultant Rachelle Williams said yesterday Chinese and other exotic cuisine restaurants were sometimes less equipped to comply with food safety laws.

Poor personal hygiene of staff and cleanliness of food preparation areas were among the biggest problems.

A 1993 episode of the television show, Seinfeld, landed the term double-dipping into popular culture when George Costanza is confronted at a funeral reception by Timmy, his girlfriend’s brother, after dipping the same chip twice.

“Did, did you just double dip that chip?” Timmy asks incredulously, later objecting, “That’s like putting your whole mouth right in the dip!” Finally George retorts, “You dip the way you want to dip, I’ll dip the way I want to dip,” and aims another used chip at the bowl. Timmy tries to take it away, and the scene ends as they wrestle for it.

Peter Mehlman, a veteran “Seinfeld” writer, wrote the episode, and said,

"At the time I was living in Los Angeles, in Venice. There was a party on one of the canals, and apparently someone dipped twice with the same chip. And a woman flipped out. ‘You just dipped twice! How could you do that? Now all your germs are in there!’ I thought, this is just too good not to use on the show.”

CNNGo.com asks this morning, “would you think twice about diving -- chopsticks first -- twice back into the communal service dishes on just about every table in Shanghai?

“… in China we all ‘double dip.’ If you say you don’t, you’ve never been to a good Chinese meal in Shanghai.

“In restaurants when we share plates of food, almost everyone takes more than a bite with their own personal chopsticks from the shared plates. That means our saliva-covered chopsticks are carrying germs back and forth all meal-long, making for one big shared germ fest on all the plates.

“However, few people, Chinese or Western, seem to view double dipped chopsticks in the same dubious light as a double-dipped chip.”

Lisa Wu, a student at Shanghai International Studies University, said,

“When I was young, my parents would only mention this issue when they caught a cold. They'd keep a separate bowl and use a pair of new chopsticks to pick out some food for themselves. But the rest of the time, we never really thought twice about sharing.”

Wu says that right after the SARS epidemic, there was a public debate on whether people should adapt Western ways of eating, with separate individual servings or at least the use of “public chopsticks” or gongkuai.

Public chopsticks are chopsticks provided for general serving, like a serving spoon, and not used for eating. However, Wu says when the SARS crisis petered out, so did the chopstick discussion.

Huang Juemin, a pediatrician at Shanghai United Family Hospital, said,

“As a teenager growing up in Shanghai in late 1980s I remember vividly the Hepatitis A outbreak. For a while, people challenged the custom of 'double dipping' and started using gongkuai -- public chopsticks.”

After discussing the double dipping issue with her internal medicine colleagues, Dr. Huang says they all believed that “definitely there is an increased risk for H. Pylori and Hepatitis A, if not Hepatitis B infections. … I think we should make an effort to use public chopsticks from the public health standpoint.”

U.K. Chinese restaurants and takeaways have dirtier kitchens than eating places serving other styles of cooking, according to environmental health officers.

A national survey of hygiene ratings found that more than half of 491 Chinese outlets failed to meet all legal requirements aimed at preventing food poisoning among diners. Almost half of Indian restaurants and takeaways surveyed also scored poorly in the survey of different cuisines, which was carried out for The Independent.

Similarly low ratings were given to kebab shops, while failings were found at a quarter of fish and chip shops and one in five Italian establishments. By contrast, corporate burger bars run by McDonald's and KFC chicken houses were found to be very clean.

Paul Hiscoe, a director of Transparency Data, which carried out the survey, said, environmental health officers believe Chinese and Indian chefs struggle on hygiene because of "a combination of culture and language.” They did not always understand food laws and often had difficulty understanding instructions from council officers.
 

This Is South Wales reports that Hon Yip Hoh pleaded guilty to 14 counts of failing to meet regulations at Swansea Oriental, in Brynmor Road and was fined £7,000.

Inspectors found his premises in a "filthy" and unhygienic state, including:

• dirty and greasy cardboard and newspaper was used to line trays and to line shelves and also in the operating gas oven;

• cooked chicken placed on top of raw chicken left to defrost at room temperature;

• when asked, staff demonstrated they were not using cleaning materials with antibacterial properties; and,

• no hot water and inadequate drainage facilities.