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Plenty of people have made compelling arguments about how the time spent debating this ordinance–and then criticizing and defending it in the 12 months since–should have been spent on something else. As reprehensible as many people find the production of foie gras, most also agree that other problems are more widespread and pressing–such as the fact that Chicago has long had one of the nation’s highest rates of serious asthma, a potentially deadly but usually treatable disease, yet the health department has never made confronting it a top priority.
“We do enforce the law, but we don’t do it proactively,” Hadac told me yesterday. He said inspectors follow up on reports of restaurants selling foie gras, but not with the same urgency they show in responding to human health concerns.
Obviously, the health department isn’t responsible for enforcing every part of the city code–Streets and San deals with problems with garbage collection, the buildings department with structural code violations, and so forth–so arguably this language is simply suggesting that it’s the job of the health department to deal with matters relating to . . . health.
