Gauteng MEC for Finance and Economic Development, Lebogang Maile, says government will continue to clamp down on non-compliant spaza shops and food-handling facilities in the province.
The MEC conducted a compliance blitz in Soweto on Monday aimed at inspecting spaza shops and other establishments selling food.
This follows a directive issued by President Cyril Ramaphosa last month, that all spaza shops and food-handling facilities must be registered with their respective municipalities, after a surge in reported cases of foodborne illnesses in the country.
“Government is going to clamp down very hard. We are going to put more pressure [on shop owners] and we are going to put more resources.
“What I can tell you with certainty is that we are taking this process seriously. That’s why we deliberately and consciously decided that we are going for the big guys now and not just the small shops. Government is putting resources to the police, we have inspectors that were here,” he said.
The MEC revealed that during an inspection of a national chain supermarket, rat droppings were found.
“We found rodent waste in one of the tins here and as you can imagine, that’s not good for human consumption. We are not happy…and we are going to come back.
“The inspectors have issued notices and warnings and removed the food. Some of the food is not even labelled. We also found that a lot of unknown products…are also not compliant.
“The focus for the longest of time has been on the spaza shops and we might have dropped the ball a bit on these big shops. We have to focus on them as well because everyone has got a responsibility to keep the standards and to also ensure that the places that they sell food from are hygienic and that people are not exposed to any danger,” he said.
Maile said although government was working hard to rid the country of expired goods and improve food handling services, business owners also bear responsibility to “ensure that they comply with the laws of the land”.
“Most importantly, I think it is unfair and disingenuous for those who run businesses to expect to make profit and not care about the lives of our people. It is selfish and greedy at best.
“With some of the findings [of the spaza shops inspections], they don’t qualify for closure but there are weaknesses that we have raised with them and we have agreed that they are going to attend to them and there will be follow ups by the inspectors.
“If we find that the shops are not in the condition to be operating, we will definitely close them down,” he said. – SAnews.gov.za
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If you love yourself, dare not to take a sleeping pill and a laxative at the same time
Neophyte Believer
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.