While the Department of Agriculture may conjure images of alfalfa, barns and cattle, its role in food safety in Butler County stretches from farm to table, whether the latter be in a family's dining room or a restaurant booth.

Conducting inspections via its Bureau of Food Safety and Laboratory Services, the department reviews the conditions of food, storage and worker sanitation in restaurants and supermarkets in all municipalities in the county except for the city of Butler, which conducts its own inspections. Regardless of who's inspecting the food retail facility, however, it's the same level of scrutiny.

“They're all inspecting to the same standard, the Pennsylvania Food Code,” said Shannon Powers, agriculture press secretary. “So, in other words, they're enforcing the Pennsylvania Food Code.”

While the COVID-19 pandemic has induced some changes — both in how inspectors conduct themselves and in enforcing the state's pandemic regulations — inspectors continue working to keep residents safe at restaurants and grocery stores.

When Gary Bonelli, the city's health officer, enters a restaurant, he has what seems like a countless list of items to review. From water temperature to fire extinguishers, his inspections are comprehensive, but they're all designed around two intertwined ideas.“What we look for is, mostly, good hygienic practice, trying to prevent any contamination by hand; approved sources of food, make sure they come in and read the proper temperatures; soap and water; food temperature controls, making sure they have thermometers and things like that,” Bonelli said. “We look for prevention of food contamination, and then, of course, we look at protection from contamination. That's like surfaces, making sure they're not contaminated, that they're clean and sanitized.”Even the menus are under the purview of a health inspector, Bonelli said. For foods like sushi made with raw fish or steaks that can be cooked to a less-than-ideal temperature at the diner's request, he likes to see a consumer advisory warning of the potential dangers of eating raw or undercooked foods.The utensils and cookware are also inspected to ensure they're properly stored, dried and cleaned. Pennsylvania also requires establishments to have at least one person who is certified in food safety, which Bonelli said is typically an owner or higher-up.Food retail establishments in Butler are inspected upon opening, when there's a change of owner and once annually while in operation. Outside of the city, inspections are a little more stringent, with establishments inspected twice a year in addition to opening and change-of-owner checks. Additionally, complaints related to food safety can trigger a follow-up inspection.Those complaints can vary anywhere from visible evidence of rodents to spoiled food. While the complaints are typically narrow, the resulting inspections are as thorough as a routine checkup, with inspectors checking that the business follows all aspects of the state food code.

Food safety violations that make the news are typically severe enough to cause an establishment to close, typically for a few days, until the issue is fully abated and an inspector conducts a follow-up visit to ensure safety.But, Bonelli said, those types of issues are few and far between.Since he began inspecting in Butler in 2006, the health officer said, he has only had to close one restaurant in the city, which was due to a number of rodents running around the facility. Typically, when a facility is not fully in compliance with the food code, they're told to abate the issue, he said, and the establishment almost always complies.“Butler is a community where it looks like almost everything, to me, is easy because they're well-educated,” he said. “If I find a problem, they'll usually abate it as soon as they can.”There are numerous violations that cause an abatement and follow-up visit. At one restaurant in the county, for example, “blackish slime residuals” on the ice machine caused an inspector to instruct the shop to turn it off and not use it until the issue was corrected and no such violation was observed on a follow-up visit.Even restaurants that are found to be compliant with the state food code can have violations, particularly those of a minor nature such as peeling paint, minor plumbing issues or non-food-contact cleanliness issues.More significant violations — foods stored at improper temperatures, cross-contaminated foods or sterilization issues, for example — trigger a “noncompliant” denotation on the inspection and a follow-up visit to ensure the violations are abated.Inspection reports are available on the Department of Agriculture's website with violations clearly delineated from the rest of the report. Powers said the entire process of a complaint-driven inspection is similarly publicized.“All of that information is public on our website and you can look it up, with the exception that there are some municipalities that don't use our system, so we don't have those posted,” she said.According to those reports, 20 retail food locations in the county were found to be noncompliant with the state food code between Aug. 3 and Sept. 18, with roughly 200 violations recorded among all locations — even those in compliance. All but one noncompliant business rectified their errors, and food code violations were found in shops and eateries marked as “compliant.”The most violations at one compliant location was nine for a restaurant with primarily minor violations such as dumpster lids being open and a leaky faucet in a handwashing area.

On top of the normal duties of a food safety inspector, the pandemic added another: watch out for violations of state-mandated virus protection measures.Early on during the COVID-19 crisis, the department slowed down the pace of its inspections in an attempt to keep its employees safe. But that was only temporary.“There was a very short period of time, at the very beginning of COVID, when there was a mitigation order, when we did scale back and do emergency inspections (of) anything that would keep a business from being able to open or anything that was urgent in terms of public health. That was just for a few weeks at the beginning of the pandemic,” Powers said. “We have never made changes other than to our practices to keep our inspectors safe.”Now, with various orders designed to slow the spread of COVID-19 targeted at bars and restaurants, the department enforces the various mitigation orders handed down by the governor and secretary of health.“Now they are, during the course of their routine inspections, looking at whether or not the restaurant is following the guidance in terms of distance between tables, wearing masks and capacity issues, and we put out weekly press releases,” Powers said.Those weekly news releases recap the number of routine inspections, complaint-driven inspections and COVID-19-related warnings and citations in each county under the department's jurisdiction.According to those releases, the agriculture department has conducted 149 routine checkups in Butler County from Aug. 3 through Sept. 20, with 10 additional complaint-driven inspections, two of which were related to COVID-19 mitigation measure complaints. Despite its nearly 160 inspections in the county, not one warning or citation related to the pandemic has been issued by the department.In sum, the agriculture department issued 18 warning letters to Pennsylvania restaurants related to COVID-19, and has issued seven citations.