No Hot Meals at GSFC

If NASA hadn't outsourced human food operations, they could have guaranteed higher levels of food safety.

"If NASA hadn't outsourced human food operations, they could have guaranteed higher levels of food safety."

Good one!

But sadly, past the jokes, this really is NASA today in a microcosm - they can't even make their own lunch without screwing it up. (And lunch is the kind of thing they should be outsourcing...) Sigh....

Time to throw the whole kid-n-kaboodle away and start again from scratch? Or can it be fixed? The Armed Forces - specifically, the Army - can maybe be a model here - they were pretty screwed up a couple of decades back, but seem to have gotten somewhat better since, without having hit the 'reboot from scratch' button.

"(And lunch is the kind of thing they should be outsourcing...) Sigh...."

From the snippet:

" These closings are based on the cafeteria contractors failure to pass their most recent food safety inspections"

??? its not like they have civil servants makes lunches.

IF there's any point to be made, then it's probably something more along the lines of even restauranteurs require routine FDA food safety inspectors, because if you look at any state's inspection records.......or something like that?

heck, remember the chinese pet food thing?

Obviously anything so dangerous and difficult as food service cannot be left to the private sector; only the professional experts of NASA should be trusted with it (requiring vastly increased funding, of course). Anything else would deny our American heritage, crush the adventuresome human appetite, and abandon the take-out industry to the Chinese.

Noel, from what we're seeing of NASA management's underhanded resistance to the new plan, which actually has a chance of making NASA a productive agency again, it may be time to consider your 'reboot from scratch' button. If they actually succeed in sabotaging the new plan, we should push it.

Noel

ex_navy and I started a discussion about the military procurement process in another thread recently. I think that this is a worthy topic at this juncture. Please look it up and comment if you so desire. Time to reboot with a different OS.

Noel,

It started here:
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/04/bolden-update-t.html#comment-33175

Everyone is welcome.

There may be a lot more to this story; so readers would be wise not to jump to conclusions. NASA cafeterias--- indeed corporate cafeterias across America--- are hard-pressed to break even with so many fast-food outlets around. Many (most?) corporate cafeterias are subsidized. This is the case regardless whether the cafeteria employees are Government or Contractor. And the HACCP standards that NASA requires are fairly rigorous; many commercial restaurants/fast food places cannot meet them. Based on anecdotal evidence at my Center, its not clear it met HACCP standards when it was NASA-run. In short, it is simplistic to blame "management" or "contracting out" for the problem--- its root cause could be considerably more complex and may indeed have an origin in many American's continuing preference for unhealthy foods!

Noel, one word of caution. A few decades ago the Army was about twice as large as it is now.

"its not like they have civil servants makes lunches."

I did notice that it was contractors. My meaning was 'it's not like this is some core function that is being messed up because they outsourced it when it should have been retained in-house - this is the kind of thing that it actually does make sense to outsource'.