Media exposure prompts health officials to do their jobs
Posted: Sunday, March 25, 2007 6:04 PM by Dateline Editor
Filed Under:
Health
by Joel Grover, KNBC reporter
In my 18 years as an investigative reporter, I've realized there are few issues more important to consumers than the safety and cleanliness of the food they eat. People assume that food in a restaurant or supermarket has been properly handled, but they never know for sure. It's our job as journalists to find out.
So I knew I might be on the trail of a big story, when I was tipped off about filthy conditions at Los Angeles' huge 7th Street Wholesale Produce Market. This is the place where thousands of restaurants and stores in California and some in neighboring states buy produce. The story began when I got a phonecall from a whistleblower who worked inside the market, telling me in great detail about how food there was getting contaminated before it even got to restaurants. Even worse, the source told me that he had repeatedly complained to the Los Angeles County Health Department about this, but inspectors had done little to force the market to correct serious health code violations. To me, this wasn't just a story about food safety. It was a story about government failing to do it's job to protect us. And it was a story that hadn't been told before. With so many food poisoning outbreaks in the news lately, we've seen a lot of stories about dirty conditions in restaurants and in the fields, but no one has taken a close look at wholesale produce markets, which are the midpoint in the "farm to fork" food chain.
It seemed apparent that the best way to get evidence of these dirty problems was with hidden cameras. So, we wired two members of our investigative team with tiny hidden cameras, and sent them to the market. After their first day there, they came back to the office telling us of disgusting problems: rats munching on produce, water that smelled like sewage dripping onto boxes of fruit, and workers urinating all around boxes of produce. We wanted to make sure the conditions we saw weren't just a fluke. So we returned to the market every week for nearly four months. We saw the same filthy problems, and kept discovering new ones.
Doing hidden-camera stories is much trickier than you might realize. For example, getting shots of rats on tape isn't easy. Rats generally avoid the daylight, and they run like lightning. It took a bit of careful planning to get shots of those fleet-footed rats. Much easier was getting shots of the human folly at the market: nearly every day, we saw workers urinating right out in the open (a major health code violation in a food facility). But it was toward the end of our investigation that we unexpectedly got the "smoking gun" undercover video, that told the story of health inspectors not doing their job.
We had requested an interview with the Los Angeles County Health Department, telling them we wanted to discuss conditions at the 7th Street Market. But they seemed to be stalling in getting back to us about doing an interview. My gut instinct told me they were up to something (I've covered the L.A. County Health Department for years). Since they obviously didn't realize we'd been undercover at the market for months, I suspected they were quickly trying to clean it up, prior to doing an interview with me. So I sent our undercover team back to the market one more time, to see if anything was up. Sure enough, they noticed health inspectors walking around, warning produce vendors that NBC was doing an investigation, and that the market had to be cleaned up before we the media showed up.
When the story hit the air in Los Angeles (it originally aired in February), elected officials were outraged at the filth and contamination at the Market. They were even angrier that the Health Dept had allowed these conditions to exist, and that inspectors had tipped off the market's vendors about our investigation. So they ordered the Health Department to either clean the place up immediately or shut it down. The Department sent in an army of inspectors, who wrote citations, shut down vendors with rat infested stalls, and forced the market's owner to clean up. Today the 7th Street Market looks cleaner than it has in years.
Throughout my investigative career, I've often noticed that government bureaucrats don't do their job, until a problem is exposed by the media. This investigation is a prime example of how it took media exposure to prompt health officials to do their job, the way they should have been doing it all along.
For information on this investigation, including expanded video clips and links, here's a link to the KNBC Web site.
