May 2007

The Health Academy in Central Harlem is not your typical academy but the stakes are high and the students are determined. They all seek the same goal — the chance of a lifetime, which begins with a simple food cart.

The Academy, run by New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, offers training in food protection for people in New York’s food service industry. From supervisors of food establishments to soup kitchen volunteers, people working with food in New York City must pass a food safety course at the academy.

The path to becoming a mobile food vendor is difficult. It begins with signing up for a license. Then all food cart vendors are required to pass the final test of the Food Protection Course for Mobile Food Vendors, offered by the Health Academy.

On the first day of the two-day class (the course for mobile vendors is eight hours over two days) one recent April afternoon, the course instructor, Akin Famojuro, asked, “Why are we here?” 

“To be clean,” one student said.

“Because I have to!” said another.

But Famojuro, a Nigerian immigrant, had another answer. “The main reason is to learn how to handle food in such a way that when people eat it, they don’t get sick,” he said.

Famojuro, who has a degree in biological sciences, was a health inspector for seven years before becoming a supervisor. He said he wanted to teach the mobile vendor course, which began in 2004, because as an inspector he worked with many vendors and had “a desire to help them.”

“For most of them, it’s new,” he said. “You can see the energy, because it’s a brand-new thing.”

The class of about two dozen students was mostly recent immigrants, from such places as Morocco, Ecuador and Bangladesh.

Many of the students expressed a simple hope for the future — that they could combine their love of food with a promising career, whether selling shish kebabs, hot dogs, fruit or bagels from a mobile cart.

One student, Juana Lopez, 41, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, planned to sell fruit outside a store in Queens. “I like fruits,” she said. “I think it’s clean. Everyone likes mangoes and pineapples!”

Because the course is taught to so many people with a wide variety of first languages, the education is predominantly visual. Manuals are offered in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Vietnamese and Bengali.

Pictures and even food props are used to demonstrate proper personal hygiene, appropriate food storage and correct food preparation. These include proper hand-washing (rub your hands together with soap for about 20 seconds, or about two choruses of “Happy Birthday”); principles like keeping cooked foods on higher shelves than raw foods in the refrigerator, and the importance of keeping hot foods hot and cold foods cold.
           
Farhid Khan Khain, 37, was working at a garment and sneaker factory when he attended the Health Academy’s Food Safety Course. His hope was to open a cart from which he could sell chicken-and-rice dishes, which he knew well from his home country of Pakistan.
           
He wasn’t so worried about the test, though.
          
“Maybe easy,”  Khain said before he took the exam. “I know food very well.”

The course also introduced the students to specifications for choosing a cart location.  City regulations require that  the sidewalk on which a cart is set up must be  at least 12 feet wide and that all  carts must  be at least 20 feet from any building entrance and 10 feet from any subway entrance.

Famojuro also covered  finding a suitable commissary, storing food and storing and cleaning the carts.  Make sure there’s a separate place to wash your cart and to store your cart, he said. Any violations are the fault of the vendors and could lead to having one’s cart seized.
           
The course even got into basic biology of germs, viruses — and the temperatures in which they thrive. Much of the information was crammed into the first four-hour class (the second class consisted of a review and the exam), but the visual presentation of the concepts made it easier to digest.

“You have a big responsibility as a mobile street vendor,” Famojuro told his students.  “Your kitchen is right on the street.”
           
As a longtime inspector of food carts, he understands how hard it is to maintain one and he knows most people don’t understand that all carts are inspected yearly.

But it’s hard to get over the stereotypes that people have held of food carts for so long, because the food is sold from the street or because many vendors don’t speak perfect English.
           
“Things are changing, there are newer, younger vendors,” Famojuro said, adding that in the past people associated vendors with unclean conditions.
           
Famojuro also gets the importance of the street cart, which someone new to the city can be proud of owning and operating.
           
“A majority of them are new immigrants,” he said of food vendors. “It’s the first step to the American dream.”