Few Butchers Use Sawdust

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31134, 10 August 1966, Page 1

Few Butchers Use Sawdust

Christchurch butchers are gradually breaking away from the tradition of having sawdust on their shop floors, and the Health Department is encouraging them to do so.

Although about 90 per cent of Auckland butchers still use sawdust, only about 20 per cent of Christchurch butchers do, according to Mr P. Doherty, president of the Christchurch Meat Retailers’ Association. “It's not used much now,” said Mr Doherty. “Most of us have tiled floors. No new shops would be using sawdust.” However, some shops with tiled floors still used sawdust on the tiles to stop

customers from slipping on pieces of fat from the chopping block. The use of sawdust will be discussed at a meeting of health inspectors in Christchurch on August 16. According to the Food Hygiene Regulations, 1952. the floor of every room used for preparing meat “shall be thoroughly cleaned with hot water at least once each working day and shall at all times be kept in a state of reasonable cleanliness.”

Mr J. B. Snoad, the Health Department’s senior health inspector in Christchurch, said yesterday that butchers’ shops came into that category because in most of them meat was still prepared on the block in the public part of the shop. Although sawdust was not mentioned specifically, said Mr Snoad, the use of sawdust was not compatible with the

regulations. Where sawdust was used on the floor the floor was not cleaned with hot water every day; it was just raked over. "We feel sawdust is not'satisfactory because of the possibility of the contamination of food by the bacteria that may be in the sawdust,” said Mr Snoad. “Butchers say sawdust stops customers from slipping, but we have to look at it from the hygiene point of view.”

Mr A. P. Millthorpe. the chief city health inspector for the Christchurch City Council, said he could not comment on the hygiene aspect of the use of sawdust because it was for the courts to decide. Sawdust was not mentioned by name in the regulations and was not referred to in a recent amendment.

Mr Millthorpe said there was nothing to prevent a but-

cher using sawdust until a court ruled that it was wrong under the Food Hygiene Regulations. Mr R. H. Gee, the Waitnairl County Council’s chief health inspector, said his attitude at the moment was that if sawdust was replenished frequently it would do.

“But we are trying to keep sawdust out of butchers' shops,” he said. “Sometimes, instead of it being replenished, it is just raked over at night and the bits of meat and fat are left in it That is not the best and we are trying to get butchers to change.” Mr Gee said local bodies had power under the regulations to require butchers to stop using sawdust if it was causing the shop to be unsatisfactory.

“But we are seeking the cooperation of butchers in the first place,” he said.