Shop

The Kansas City Star reports on severe sanitation problems at city's restaurants. The investigation main findings include that roughly 800 food establishments had gone a year or more without routine inspection; the inspection staff is generally inexperienced and poorly paid; the city food code lacks serious financial penalties and is based on 25-year-old federal standards many other cities abandoned years ago. The stories document about 20,000 food code violations discovered by city inspectors from 1996 to 1999. In some instances, inspectors ignored sanitation problems that could have led to closing of a restaurant.