Against Mandatory Food Hygiene Training: Against Forced Labour
Why a free society must allow people to pour soup without being trained first
Food hygiene training is forced labour, hence, if you are against forced labour, you must be against food hygiene training. Arguments concerning the risk of food poisoning being too high without it, warranting mandated training, are implausible, because private persons can expose dinner guests to the same risk without training, so staff in businesses should be entitled to do so as well. And, if it is simply claimed the mandatory training is warranted because the costs of doing so are outweighed by the benefits, there is nothing, in principle, to stop forced labour across the economy. In a liberal society forced labour is always unacceptable, for individuals are ends in themselves, not mere means to the fulfilment of any greater good. Hence, to ensure respect for individual freedom, food hygiene training must be abolished. And forthwith too!
In Britain all staff handling food must undergo mandatory hygiene training, which may be fulfilled through on the job instruction or self-study. Managers are also required to develop a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Plan which must identify potential risks, provide plans to control these, and ensure record keeping of these endeavours. Failure to train staff or develop a HACCP results in punishment. These requirements were established by the Food Hygiene Regulations Act 2006 and the Food Safety Act 1990. In practise this legislation is so stringent, without being trained, a member of staff is not allowed to make sandwiches or even pour soup for customers. We may now turn to the liberal argument against this maddening set of laws.
If you invite guests to a dinner party it is permissible to serve them soup without having been trained in food hygiene. Analogously, if you run a restaurant, it should be permissible to serve them soup without having been trained in food hygiene as well. In both instances the state requiring training (which only occurs in the latter case), i.e., forced labour, impermissibly restricts individual freedom. Hence, food hygiene training should be abolished. What then could be the justification for this illiberal regulation? Let us consider the Food Standard Authority’s reasoning.
The FSA maintains food hygiene training must be in place to ensure ‘the food you serve is safe to eat…[it] helps prevent food poisoning.’ Essentially, no training results in too much risk to consumers, and, given, restaurants have no right to serve food with such high risk, they may be forced to make it safer, so as to not violate people’s rights against being served excessively dangerous food. The issue with this argument is it proves too much though. On this reasoning individuals putting on dinner parties and providing food to their children and spouses would be exposing them to “too much risk” as well, hence, food hygiene training would have to be required for private persons too. This is unacceptable, and, for this reason, given private persons should be able to expose their guests to food prepared by the untrained, so businesses should be able to expose their customers to food prepared by the untrained too.
Perhaps it may be claimed restaurants, pubs and cafes are so unclean the creation of food within them exposes customers to far more risk than private persons do hosting dinner parties, and, hence, to reduce risk down to the permissible level, food hygiene training is only required for businesses. I doubt this is true. Given we allow private parties with very dirty kitchens to have guests, and we accept they can be untrained, it is clear the threshold for how dirty a facility can become before training must become compulsory is very high. It is really unreasonable to suppose pubs, bars and restaurants are, on the whole, likely to get this bad, hence, there is no warrant for training to be forced upon their employees.
Proponents of the training may claim I have mischaracterised their argument. Perhaps they may claim training every private person would be too costly, i.e., the benefits of reduced food poisoning etc. would be outweighed by the time foregone doing training. In contrast, training the chef who produces thousands of meals will not be too costly, i.e., because the benefits of reduced risk to so many consumers outweigh the time and money foregone training. And for this reason training should be required in businesses, but not in private places. Note the shift in ethical theory here. Before food hygiene training was required to ensure food did not come with too much risk, now risk per se is irrelevant (hence, the dinner party host could expose his guests to more risk than a dirty restaurant) and only the cost benefit analysis of the training is.
As with the risk argument, the cost benefit argument may seriously restrict individual freedom too. If, for example, training wives how to clean the fridge produced net benefits for their families it would be permissible to force them into such training. Indeed, on this argument there is no reason why forced labour should be confined to training alone. For example, if a doctor didn’t want to do any more lifesaving operations, but the benefits to doing them would be in the hundreds of thousands, and the cost to him of foregone leisure triple his wages, meaning net benefits would be ensured for society by requiring him to work, then it would be permissible to force him to do so. The same goes for all work in principle: Musicians, surgeons and firefighters could all be forced to work if the benefits are large enough.
Forced labour is unacceptable, hence, so is mandatory food hygiene training. Individuals are ends in themselves and may not be used for ensuring the greater good, whether to ensure safer food, or lifesaving operations. This argument is solid, nonetheless, I suspect some will argue kitchen and bar staff are not forced to labour because no one requires them to become kitchen or bar staff in the first place, hence, they have really chosen the “forced labour” by becoming kitchen or bar staff. This is bunkum. Individuals may acknowledge they must be trained by law, however, the training remains forced because the individuals always had the liberty to serve food without training in the first place.
Only if we granted the state the right to control occupations would their training requirement not be forced labour because then officials could claim you must accept their rightfully imposed conditions, which would be analogous to businesses today requiring training (not mandated by law). Anyone who believes in a free society must reject this Soviet idea: Individuals have the right to go into whatever occupation they so please. And that right includes the right to pour soup without being trained!
At this point I suspect my more safety inclined readers will claim abolishing food hygiene training will lead to more food poisoning and illness resulting from uneducated staff. It must be said, people are not sloths, they take pride in the food they cook, and want to make it safe. But, disregarding this, if unsafe food is really what must be accepted to avoid forced labour, I am prepared to bite the bullet. However, there are two mechanisms through which food safety could be ensured absent regulation, indeed, the latter mechanism would ensure an optimum quantity of safety in places involving food.
Without doubt there is some level of risk of food poisoning it is impermissible to expose customers too. If a restaurant poisoned five per cent of all its customers they could permissibly be stopped from operating: In serving customers they would be exposing them to too much risk. However, I would maintain this level is far above the level almost all restaurants would expose their customers to in an unregulated market. Where is this level? I do not know, but I know it is high. Moreover, it is worth noting, if the restaurant which poisoned five per cent of its customers clearly labelled they did so, then their operation would be permissible too.
Below this level though firms will require hygiene training and safety measures up until the point the benefits of reduced costs from compensation for food poisoning are equal to the cost of the training and safety measures themselves. Where chefs are dealing with lots of raw meat and there is large risk of cross contamination training will most likely be prudent. If you are only serving soup and sandwiches though there really is no need for training at all, indeed, requiring training provides too much safety. That is because the benefits of the reduced risk of food poisoning are outweighed by the cost of the training itself, whether in foregone down time, e.g., standing behind the bar looking at your phone, or by the monetary cost of buying a hygiene training course, or in reduced customer attention, or in higher prices to consumers. Or, as occurred to myself recently at a bar, you simply don’t get any soup because no one is trained to serve it.
Now we can all imagine an individual saying you can never have too much safety. This sounds good, nonetheless, no one really believes it. If a restaurant could sack half its waiters and divert all the saving to hygiene training to reduce the chances of food poisoning from 0.03% to 0.01%, I think most of us would say we’d rather take the higher risk and have the sacked waiters back. And what this shows is we value the convenience of more waiters to the benefit of more safety. As Bryan Caplan explains, the only reason why people say things like `you can never have too much safety` is social desirability bias i.e., because it sounds good. What people should be saying is we live in a world which is far too safe and not cheap or convenient enough. Try getting a politician to say that though.
In conclusion, it is clear if you oppose forced labour you must oppose mandatory food hygiene training too. The argument hygiene training is required to bring risk down to a permissible level is flawed because preparing food without such training does not expose people to too much risk, as demonstrated by our acceptance of untrained hosts of dinner parties permissibly serving food. And the argument it is permissible to require people to be trained simply because the benefits outweigh the costs is unacceptable too, because it permits forced labour, i.e., the violation of individual liberty, across the economy. For all these reasons, if we wish to live in a free society, mandatory food hygiene training must be abolished.
I agree that it is iniquitous and unreasonable to force people to undergo 'training' to get/retain their jobs. Though I have no doubt that the majority of people running things in Britain today think it's perfectly reasonable and would extend compulsion much further, including into private life - they believe that individuals are effectively owned by the state, and as we saw during the Covid insanity, there are hardly any lengths they will not consider going to to enforce what they see as 'benign' despotism. My suggestion is that state interference in this area should be completely removed and that restaurants and pubs should create their own voluntary scheme, whereby they can encourage staff to undergo sensible and relevant training; on attaining various standards they could display ratings prominently at their establishments. People would naturally tend to patronise those establishments with higher ratings, so the system would be self-sustaining. A bit like the 'review' systems you get on online hotel and travel booking sites these days.
Are you planning on opening a restaurant?