City Inspectors Destroy Food

A little bit of overkill we think:

• City health inspectors used bleach to destroy hundreds of pounds of frozen fruit puree and threw out other food in a West Town kitchen on Thursday night, citing not safety violations but a lack of proper licensing.

  The fruit -- apples, plums, raspberries, pears, blueberries and peaches from local growers harvested and frozen last summer -- belonged to pastry chef Flora Lazar, who valued it at thousands of dollars.

  Lazar had rented space for her business, Flora Confections, at Kitchen Chicago, a shared cooking facility for small artisan bakers, candymakers and caterers. A second business, the caterer Sunday Dinner Club, said it lost more than $1,000 in discarded cassoulet, granola bars and baking supplies.

And of course, it wouldn't be Chicago without dragging the police in:

• Lazar, who had planned to use the purees to make fruit gelees for Valentine's Day, tried to give the fruit to her son, but an inspector called in the Chicago Police Department to intervene. The bags of fruit were then slashed open and treated with bleach.

Harvested and frozen, the fruit would have kept for months. To destroy it over licensing, rather than health issues, would seem to open the city up to all sorts of liability. Government can't just destroy property on sight where no threat to public health exists. And dragging the police in for something that doesn't fall in the realm of public safety seems ludicrous. What the heck is really going on here?