"ODESSA — Leaders of the Black Cultural Council say volunteers and the black community felt “humiliated” after two health department food inspectors threatened to put a stop to a Juneteenth celebration over questions about food preparation for 600 free barbecue sandwiches.
Council President Jo Ann Davenport-Littleton said health inspectors told them it was illegal for the group to serve the sandwiches because they were not prepared at the site where they were served.
Gino Solla, the county’s top health official, said state law prohibits any food service operation from having food prepared in a private home for public consumption.
“I hate that it happened,” Davenport-Littleton said in a story for today’s edition of the Odessa American. "I wanted people to go away talking about how great the celebration was this year. All you heard was ‘They were going to deny us barbecue. Here we are in modern-day slavery again.’ "
:dubious:
I agree that its’ modern day slavery to deny people BBQ sandwiches.
Obviously, the Emancipation Proclamation may as well never have happened, if people aren’t going to be allowed to serve food in violation of Texas’s food safety legislation.
If y’all think you can take the newspaper’s quote as an accurate accounting of what a person said, you are sadly mistaken. The newspapers are full of misquotes. What burns me is that the reporters I’ve been subjected to won’t even call and confirm what a person said. Grrrr.
While playing the slave card is so far over the top it’s back around to the bottom again, something doesn’t seem quite right about this. Is there no catering industry in Texas? I find it hard to believe that every wedding reception or cotillion or whatever is held someplace where there is a full professional kitchen where the bakers are making the cake or squirting whipped cream on tarts or whatever.
Clearly the Health Department’s just being overzealous because of the current statewide salmonella outbreak. How bad do they really think it could be if 600 revellers were to simultaneously fall violently ill from being exposed to tainted homemade potato salad? Geez, it was only 98F.
Given the Inverse Law of Barbecue, it was probably orgasmic.
The Inverse Law of BBQ:
“The quality of barbecue to be found at any given establishment is inversely proportional to the building in which it is served.”
This is why barbecue restaurants with ferns, brass railing, real wood accents, and subdued lighting invariably serve shit food, while (for instance) Dreamland, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which is a tar-paper shack in the worst part of town, with “no farting” signs on the walls, and where they throw the gnawed bones to the packs of feral dogs in the parking lot, is fabulous.
I don’t know that a mere health code violation would rise to those standards, but it can’t hurt.
Amid the rampant slavery, feral dogs, and finger-licking goodness, a question arises.
I (were I in Texas) can’t give out 600 BBQ sandwiches made in my kitchen. I imagine that I could safely make one for a friend, however. So how many is too many?
I though the food had to be prepared on site in public so agents of The Man could surreptitiously infect it with their sterilization drugs and lab-invented AIDS virus.
I don’t think it’s a question of numbers – it’s about “public consumption”. If you invite 600 friends to eat BBQ in your back yard, that would be fine, because it’s private. If you sell BBQ from your front porch to passers-by, that’s public, and one customer is too many.
