Food Sanitation, or What We Are Really Being Served

Many of us learned about the horrors of America’s early days in the meat industry when we read The Jungle, whether that be in regards to the rodent secretions winding up in ground beef or workers losing body parts in sausage. And, we’ve all been through Chinatown where on any given day you can see tiny worms crawling on the half living animals in buckets or turtles piled higher than a full stack of flapjacks. So, it should have come as little surprise to me when I saw the level of food sanitation wasn’t much better overseas in another “first-world” country. Okay, so all of the meat I saw in Spain looked fresh and clean. And I must admit it was quite encouraging to see that many butchers sold whole animals, head and all, rather than trying to hide that fact that the meat actually came from an animal as often seems to happen in American supermarkets. Besides, when you have the head there to look at, you can use the clarity of the eyes as an indicator as to how fresh the meat is.

So what's my beef with Spain's food sanitation? Well, for starters, it seemed that about half of the restaurants that I ate in had no soap in their bathrooms. But that's just a minor fault. Who knows if somewhere behind the kitchen wall they scour their hands clean before handling food. What was truly absurd to the point of comedy was some of the handling that occurred right in front of my face. Apparently some workers never got the memo that the 5 second rule is really just a joke. I witnessed the adherence to what was more like the 50 second rule two days in a row in Granada. The first time was at a shop that sold freshly made potato chips. The round woman behind the glass counter must have handled too much grease that day because one of the coins I gave her slipped through her hands into the vat of chips. With a dumbfounded look, she proceeded to spend the next minute fishing around for the change. Sure, you can't serve change up in chips to future customers, but one has to wonder how many objects have fallen into those chips from which I was about to eat. You'd think they would have moved the cash register to the side of the food area. The next day I went into a bakery that was smart enough to have the register separate from the counter of food, but that doesn't prevent all food contamination mishaps. This time it involved a much used pen falling on top of pastries with sticky toppings. That was an easy item to remove, but of course those contaminated jelly rolls stayed right where they were waiting for the next customer to snatch one up.

The lesson here, folks, is that humans evolved with a highly hostile mouth environment and hardy digestive system for a reason.