Starting this week, New York City will implement a new food-safety grading system. Like the one in Los Angeles that inspired it, the new system calls for a letter grade to be given to every restaurant, which will then have to hang it on a big sign in the front. Those proprietors whose kitchens harbor fruit flies — or raw fish of less-than-frigid temperature — will be shamed like Hester Prynne for all the world to see. (Although, unlike poor Hester, they will be given a chance to clean up their act before the ritual marking takes place.)
I found this development odd, given the tenor of our times. Right now Americans seem to be clamoring to dismantle the government, and in many states, the most basic regulatory apparatuses have fallen into disuse. But New York and L.A. have become downright draconian in their urge to oversee the inner workings of small businesses like restaurants. Is this the rise of a countercultural oasis, nanny-state bastions in two of the country’s most liberal cities? Or is it just that people are more worried about what goes into their bodies than they are about getting the government back to Gilded Age levels of intrusiveness?
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