Have you ever gone out to dinner and wondered, looking down at the magnificent meal before you, just what happened to the food before it arrived at your table? Did the chef wash his hands? Was the meat handled properly?
Here’s a food for thought – Did you know that about 3,ooo Americans die every year from foodborne diseases? A recent survey conducted by health specialists of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the kitchens of hundreds of restaurants across 10 (California, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, New York, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Iowa and Tennessee) to determine which practices could be making people sick, revealed statistics so terrifying, that it’d make you think twice before munching on that beloved beef burger.
Here’s what they found:
- Their findings revealed that almost two thirds of the restaurant staff do not wash their hands after handling raw beef. And needless to say, the employees have then happily touched other food items without washing their hands, successfully spreading pathogens like E coli to other food which causes more than 61,000 illness.
- Most managers do not know the safe cooking temperature for chicken. That bucket of fried chicken you are hauling around for lunch might just be raw. *Shudder*
- Half of the managers in the conducted survey admitted that they do not use a thermometer to make sure a burger is cooked. They simply rely on the touch and feel technique, which means that the burgers are mostly way beyond undercooked (read: didn’t kill all the dangerous bacteria!)
- Did you know that raw chicken are cut on the same board used for cutting vegetables, and that too without gloves? That means that dangerous bacteria could move from the raw meat onto your veggies. It’s much safer to eat at a vegan restaurant!
- The employees are forced to work despite being sick because they a have no paid sick leave or sick leave policy. So if a cook vomits, or a staff is suffering from diarrhea, they are not allowed a day off. A trip to the bathroom and back to the kitchen is made without washing the hands.
- If you plan on taking the leftovers back home, demand that the staff bring a box to your table so that you could pack it yourself. The busy restaurant bus boys are infamous for scooping fallen food off of the kitchen mat and shoving it into the go container.
Oh man – gross!
Oh man – gross!