My son and I had some take out ordered in. It had been a while we had done that, and he ordered Chinese from one of his favourite restaurants; one that I thought was among the better ones around.

As we were eating from the take-out box, he said something that intrigued me. “I feel safer”, he said. “Look, the gravy has no scary colour”.

I dropped my spoon and looked closer. The gravy was indeed almost clear. “What gives?", I asked.

“Oh! All restaurants are cautious now. No one uses any colours or dyes anymore. He’s done it! But some people I know are very mad at him because he shut down that burger joint”.

For years the complaint was that nobody was doing anything. The kitchens were filthy, the packaged foods were full of substances we should stay miles away from even in an apocalypse, and everyone knew it. There were stories, there were photographs, there was the particular way certain gravies came out a colour that doesn't occur in food. And the standard line, delivered with a shrug, was that this is how it is here, nobody checks, nobody ever will.

Then somebody started checking. An officer who apparently intended to do the job as written — surprise inspections, actual enforcement, closures where closures were warranted. And for a while he was a hero. People shared news about the raids like sports results.

Until he shut a place they loved.

Then the same people were furious. Not at the restaurant, but at him. He'd gone too far. He was being rigid. He was on a power trip. How did he not understand that this place had been there for decades; that generations had eaten there.

None of that has anything to do with whether the kitchen was safe. The affection is real. A place can be genuinely beloved and also be poisoning people, and the second thing doesn't become less true because of the first.

The restaurant owners being upset, I understand completely. They're losing money, their business has changed overnight, and people don't take that calmly, even when they're in the wrong. That's not hypocrisy; it's self-interest, and it's at least plausible. But what about the rest of us? We're the ones the enforcement is for. We were the ones being served the food. When the inspector shuts a bad kitchen, that's not something happening to us; that's the entire point — and the only reason we ever heard about the violations at all is that somebody finally went and looked. The information we're upset by is a product of the thing we asked for. What it comes down to is that people didn't want the rule enforced. They wanted it enforced elsewhere.

Everyone's in favour of standards in the abstract, and the abstract is a place where the cost always lands on someone else — the anonymous bad restaurant across town, the one you were never going to visit. Standards are wonderful right up until the moment they cost you something you liked, and then they're an overreach.

The tell is that nothing about the officer changed. He did the same thing on Tuesday that he was applauded for on Monday. The only variable was whose favourite place it was.

And I keep thinking: this is the version where it works. This is what it looks like when the system does the thing everyone spends years complaining it never does. If we can't tolerate it even here, when it's food safety, when the violations aren't in dispute, when the alternative is eating whatever was in that kitchen — then what exactly were we asking for?

I don't get it.