Food Workers Spitting in Your Food?

I was reading an article about being choosy about the restaurants you visit. The author had been on the receiving end of food poisoning. The gist of the article can be summed up thusly: If the bathroom is dirty, the kitchen is most likely filthy as well. Leave. Quickly. Or risk having a big plate of contaminated food.

On the surface this is just good advice. Heed the advice and you can feel better knowing that the Red Lobster you're eating in is probably not going to give you food poisoning. Or at least the chances are no worse than they would have been if you made the meal in your own kitchen.

But coincidentally I ran into this link regarding restaurant safety as well. The information in it was not pleasant to read. I hope the link is still good if you decide to read it.

For some extra information on that link, it goes to a site called Reddit. It's a site where you normally find websites linked to and commented on; different user vote stories up or down based on how much the enjoyed or hated the story. If something is big and full of buzz, it's normally at the top of Reddit.

But there's also a number of "comment" posts that people can enter, where they ask questions or ask for advice. If it's voted high enough it travels up the list to the top and other people find it and it draws more comments. That link was one of them asking whether people in the restaurant industry have or know of people spitting in the food.

The comments are...well, disconcerting. The concensus seemed to be (at the time I read it, which is a disclaimer since the questions can be edited and altered as long as the story exists on the site) that it does happen, primarily to customers that were real pricks to the staff. It wasn't a common everyday occurrence but it happens.

And there were cases where some employees just did it to do it.

Spitting in food. Stirring drinks with male anatomy.

Some said there were non-"dirty things" that were standard procedure with many restaurants and could make your skin crawl. Example: dropped chicken wings on the floor, the cook scooped them back up and dropped them in the fryer. "The dirt and bacteria are all cleaned off by the heat". I remember seeing that in a documentary about a restaurant, so I know that the comment isn't all that far-fetched.

Thinking about it is one of those things that gives me the heebie jeebies. I won't be able to go into a restaurant or fast food joint without thinking about it.

There are many things we ignore or conveniently tuck away into the recesses of our minds because the "truth" is rather disconcerting and uncomfortable. Examples: where your hamburger comes from. The truth behind the top one percent of the population having eighty percent of the wealth. The odds of you actually winning at the casino or lottery (probably not all that different from each other). Even the number of people that die every day on the streets in car accidents, or the number of people that are driving while distracted by their cell phones, texting, or reading a freakin' newspaper behind the wheel.

So how are you supposed to react? Shun all the things that a modern society gives us because of the risks associated with using these conveniences? Or just file these things away and suspend the knowledge that these things are happening?