As just reported by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) : New York City’s trailblazing Department of Health and Mental Hygiene voted yesterday to require the city’s restaurants to post letter grades reflecting the establishment’s cleanliness. That move was applauded today by the nonprofit CSPI, which has been calling on cities and state legislatures to adopt such measures. Letter grades have been used in Los Angeles County restaurants for the past 11 years, and that popular measure is credited with Mail Attachmentreducing the number of hospitalizations due to foodborne illness there.

A 2008 CSPI review of 539 restaurant inspections in 20 cities found that two-thirds of restaurants had troubling critical food safety violations. That report, Dirty Dining, contained harrowing accounts of chicken salad stored at a bacteria-friendly 50 degrees, mouse droppings in ice machines, and roaches scampering across cutting boards. CSPI found that many of those inspection reports were hard for the public to obtain; CSPI investigators had to pry reports from some secretive health departments with formal requests made under the Freedom of Information Act.

“L.A. was the first to put food safety letter grades in restaurant windows. But with 24,000 restaurants representing virtually every cuisine on Earth, New York City can show that if you can make it happen there, you can make it happen anywhere,” said CSPI food safety attorney Sarah Klein.

“Of course, we also want to prevent food from being contaminated before it even enters a restaurant, which is why Congress needs to give the FDA the authority and resources it needs to do that job,” Klein said. The Senate is expected have a vote on final passage of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act this spring.