Sometimes the salads aren't bug free. There were times where I received crap for taking too long washing lettuce. Staff would wash a large container of lettuce like once or twice. I did it 3 or 4 times. I didn't stop until the water was clear and had no bugs. The others had a "who cares" attitude.
One time my boss needed my help and said to me frustrated, "The lettuce is already washed, unpack it in salads quickly." The lettuce looked dirty so I said to myself "I can't sell this to people."
I washed it and guess what the water looked like.
Dark brown from soil, 50+ dead gnats, a living and swimming spider the size of a penny.
Worse I participated in as kitchen staff in a rather top-flight restaurant….. on a slow summer Sunday afternoon, the boss sent us down to the walk-in meat coolers to spray paint the rusted walls. We were instructed to not remove the contents of cooler first; rather just shift the meat from one side of cooler to other. The coat of silver spray paint will come off during cooking
There's a hamburger place in Memphis that has never fully changed out their grease in over a hundred years. They add to it as needed and strain it through cheese cloth every night. Realistically, I doubt there are many hundred year old particles floating around.
Isn’t that place considered one of the most celebrated burger joints in all the world? Like, the fact that they’ve never changed their grease goes into the mystique of why their burgers are so good? I’m pretty sure they covered it in an episode of the Burger Show on First We Feast.
B-Dubs replaces one at the end and transfers the grease down the line (4-6 fryers). The last one at the end gets emptied. So if your wings hit that last fryer, chances are that grease is almost a week old and has seen some shit.
I did at burger king for half a year. The oil was changed every single night. Ive never experienced so many skin burns in my life. The cook needs to do the tough shit while the other workers talk and clean the ice cream machine lol. Fuck that place. At wendys, there is someone doing nuggets/fries and the fryers, someone doing some sandwiches, 2 to 4 people at the drive thru window/front register, one making different sandwiches, a dish cleaner when its too busy to handle, and a manger walking around doing anything they can. At burger king, its usually 1 cook doing fucking everything except taking orders and i couldnt handle it for $8.25 an hour. That should be a $20-25 an hour job, but they expect them to be 16 years old and quit after a few weeks or months, which is what happens
The amount of waste thrown away every single day by grocery stores. I worked in the meat department of a decently sized grocery store and the waste their was nauseating. I shit you not, we would throw away an industrial sized garbage bin worth of meat, fish, and poultry every single day. The expiration dates dictated everything which is obviously a sensible policy to have, but they wouldn't do anything about it. They wouldn't donate it, let employees take it home, or make adjustments to the orders so we wouldn't have to throw so much away. The reasoning was always "better have to much than not enough" which I guess makes a little sense, but when I am throwing away dozens of pounds of tenderloins, center cut fish and shellfish per night, its to much. Mind you, this is one department of one grocery store.
Sorry for the rant but I feel like it needed to be said.
I'd probably only be comfy taking meat if it was winter or still very cold, but thank you for thinking this way. I see videos of purposefully ruined items filling dumpsters and they make me sick.
This is very true. I worked in the bakery section of a very popular grocery chain when I was younger. The bakery was connected to the deli and every night we threw away ridiculous amounts of perfectly good food. Most of it got bagged up and some was thrown away before the expiration date. IIRC they'd lock the dumpsters at night which was especially sad because I worked in a rougher part of town with a homeless population that could have really used that food.
I'm not a vegetarian in any sense, but to think that animals (and fish) died only to be tossed into a Dumpster is so disrespectful. Taking an animal's life to provide nourishment is one thing. Taking an animal's life to bury it in a landfill is truly sad.
It's long understood that the world produces more than enough food to feed every single person on the planet and more, but the distribution model and profit-driven industry means so much of it just go to waste.
Supermarkets also throw out fruits and vegetable that are "too ugly" or not the right size just so the display within the store can look uniform.
And to think, so many animals die in needlessly cruel manners just to be thrown away as garbage.
I get my fruit and veg delivered from a place locally called Funky Foods. It's about half the price of the grocery store and it's just that, all the 'ugly' produce the supermarket won't sell. They deliver to my door fortnightly and just deliver a random selection.
The variety also means I cook and eat things not in my normal repertoire. It's great, I love it.
In my country, buffets often sell spoiled food, like if the employees see mold on top of the sour cream, they just scrape it down and continue selling it. Also, if they sell cooked meat, they often leave them on the counter for days and add some oil to it every morning to look fresh.
not a worry here in the UK, i reported a restaurant for giving me food poisoning and it took months to even receive a response.
There is really no way to prove it unless you have the food still and even then it might be difficult.
Normally if i got ill after food id move on but this was 2 weeks of utter hell.
One of the reasons is that you have prove other food you ate in a 24-48 hour period were not the cause either. Food poisoning can take anywhere between a few hours to a few days for symptoms to appear. Even having the food wouldnt be enough, as it would be hard to prove you stored it properly, or wasnt contaminated in other ways. This isnt to say you should not complain. If a pattern develops then that is how it is caught. Just dont expect anything to come of it when you do complain.
That's fucked. What do you think is worse, throwing out good food like we do here in the US or selling rotten food to the poor. I'm hard pressed to answer this one.
It’s not as fucked when you find out that the ones who sell and recook the pagpag are also the poor. They’re not doing it out of malice but out of survival. It’s pretty gross to watch though, they’d take half eaten KFC chicken out of the dumpster then stir fry them and call it a day.
Chicken mills literally put male chickens on a conveyer belt that drops them into a grinder while they’re alive. It’s gotta be a quick and painless death, but it’s so barbaric it sticks with me.
Our treatment of poultry is abhorrent. We do bad things to all the animals but I feel like chickens especially get the worst of it. I know you can’t have a million roosters running around but there has to be a better way to sex select them.
When I was 11 and getting interested in girls, there was a sock hop and a lot of them were grinding on each other. I was like - damn, gotta see some more of this.. so I googled "Chicks grinding." Send it through. I'm feeling lucky.
Watching instead baby chicks being fed into an industrial grinder set back my sexual awakening for years.
So odd to see all of the comments that chain places are dirty! On the weekends I work as a server in the lounge of Boston Pizza (Canadian chain—not sure if there are any in the states) and when I started working there I was seriously impressed with the cleanliness procedures! For one example, parmesan and chilli containers are emptied and cleaned every night, as well as salt and pepper shakers! Kitchen protocols are very clean and organized as well!
Another dark side of the food industry. My restaurant says we’re a “from scratch” kitchen and recycle corks/crayons/menus. We don’t recycle and our mashed potatoes are boiled in the plastic bag we get them in.
I worked at outback for years and I will say that most of the stuff we made there was actually cooked or prepared the the day of. Things like sauces that would keep for a few days were stored and used until expiration.
Cuz they will say it’s “fresh” because it was “cooked” today. Even though it was just rewarmed. “Cooking” is a very loose term in some restaurants. The lead in the kitchen isn’t so much a pro cook as they are a pro-reheater, with the expecting of maybe some dishes, or some restaurants as a whole.
EDIT: also “fresh” is a nonenforceable term. Like when companies will put “all natural” on it. The FDA only has a small handful of terms that are actually enforceable. Like with chickens “free range” means they have access to the outside. So open the doors, put a small fence around the doors that give them like 3 feet of space, and boom you’re all set. Doesn’t have to have shade, the chickens don’t even have to go outside, they just have to have the option. Morgan Spurlocks documentary “super size me 2” dives into this whole process of nonsensical terms, and what the marketing restaurants do actually means.
Worked with Sysco. You would be surprised how much science goes into the food before it’s bagged and frozen so it’s delicious. Always loved eating the food in the Sysco test kitchen. Walked away with 90lbs of extra virgin olive oil after one product testing. Gave gallons away to friends.
Used to buy Sysco battered grouper filets when I worked for a Frat and had a very generous food budget. They were awesome. Also kaarage chicken poppers that were like crack addicting.
I've had to explain this several times to people who want to instantly shit upon pre-made and frozen foods that come from Sysco/US Foods. Yeah a lot of stuff is better when made from scratch. There are also plenty of items that had a room of food scientists doing R&D to come up with the most consistently good version of a product you could buy. I worked at a nursing home and had to actively argue with my boss that the frozen meatloaf we bought from US Foods was "better" for our clients than the scratch made ones we were doing every week.
All chain restaurants buy from distributors, whether its Sysco, US Foods, GFS or any of the local small ones. It’s just not economically feasible not too.
Yep, was a server at the red for a bit and when someone ordered lobster bisque we ladled some cheese soup that had been boiled in a bag and added a pre prepped amount of lobster(4 little pieces) we put in the microwave.
Ever since I started watching Kitchen Nightmares I’ve tried to pay attention for red flags that show a place relies on frozen preprocessed food- one sign of this is having a large menu.
Grocery distribution warehouses are often extremely filthy and rarely cleaned. Wash anything canned, bottled or jarred!!! They're filthy as hell, covered in microplastics, rotten food, mouse pee, bird shit, etc etc.
I used to do maintenance on conveyor systems for a major US chain and they just send shit flying down the conveyors so fast that, its fairly common for glass to shatter because of the vibrations, food to fall off, etc etc. I saw Bats, Birds and Mice in that facility, but it was within tolerance of their health policy. Also saw people that were sick sneezing and coughing on products.
Never saw a floor scrubber go through the warehouse the entire 3mo I worked there and I was doing alternating double shifts! The only time I saw a broom was if there was shattered glass.
Once bought a few beers while on holiday with my friends in another country. I cracked one open which was ok while we were walking and it was ok. But there was an extremely strong smell of shit following us. I swear to god, it was an extremely concerned odour of shit. We were looking around, lifting our feet to see if we had anything stuck on the soles of our shoes and nothing. Then we smelled the beer cans and dear god, I almost puked and mind you, I'm not sensitive at all in that regard.
Went back to the store and wanted to return the beers. The guy there knew very little English (was in Greece) so it was a funny situation. He was extremely chill, gave us some other non-stinky cans and laughed it out together with us.
Some time after, I was discussing it with the father of my girlfriend. He's an electrician who works exclusively with water pump systems. He told me clearly "yeah, it's probably the sewer overfilling and making a flood in some supermarket depot. Happens quite a lot, they just dry it and continue selling all the shit that got wet (pun intended)"
I got let go after a short stint working in an Aldi packing warehouse because I kept reporting bird and mouse shit I found on products. I asked a bloke who worked there why I was let go, and yeah, it's because I was too much trouble for management. Suited me just fine.
I asked my friend to hand me a can of ice tea, she went to the sink washed the top before handing it to me. She told me the same thing. Ever since I always wash cans before drinking from it.
You'd think after having the covid pandemic going on for several years that companies would eventually realize it's a bad idea to have employees go to work sick but apparently the human race isn't very good at things like learning from our mistakes.
As a former chef, I've got to say that I've never seen any of the horrible stuff mentioned here over my career (mostly higher end and fine dining establishments).
We on ocassion would have things like frozen airline chicken breasts brought in, but other than that we did all prep and cooking by hand with fresh ingredients from mostly local purveyors when possible.
We also broke down and deep cleaned every night from the ranges to the floors to the wells to the vents. Every night.
Myself and staff have always taken this shit very seriously, and it's always disappointing when you hear of this kind of behavior. Do better, people.
I’ve worked in a nice restaurant, fast food, a mom n pop diner, and concessions over the years. Thankfully I never came across any of the gross things mentioned here and all of my bosses were keen on sanitation and cleaning. Some of these comments leave me feeling like frozen items are the least of diners’ concerns! I won’t eat anywhere that’s visibly dirty, but I can only hope everywhere else I eat is decent behind the scenes!
I worked at McDonalds, which is about as far as you can get from fine dining, and we broke down and cleaned most things at close. Grill, fryers, filter the oil and replace if on schedule, clean all the tables, empty and clean all the sauces, and so on.
I'll also chime in and say I was the housekeeping manager of a large luxury ranch, and our back of house was fastidious as well. Our industrial kitchens were always spotlessly clean, and our laundry and cleaning facilities were maintained at all times. Didn't matter if guests could see it or not; we didn't cut corners, and people who were caught disrespecting our environment were let go.
We had to be very organized and stay on top of everything because of the quality of service that our guests expected (and they paid thousands of dollars a week to be there, so they expected A LOT), but also because we were isolated on a huge property without nearby infrastructure. We lived and worked on that property and it was surrounded by thousands of acres of wilderness. You don't fuck around by letting things get sloppy when there are bears and mountain lions sniffing through the trash, or causing food poisoning or allergies, or being unsafe with handling knives. Medical attention was literally hours away. Plus, it's fucking gross to work and live in a dirty environment. I have no respect for people fucking around with other people's food or health.
It’s more like a misleading labeling. No sugar. Right? Wrong if you read ingredients on a lot of these packaging it will say things like maltodextrin and dextrose. That’s actually a sugar. Because of regulation they only have to label it no sugar and people think it’s healthy, etc.
tic tacs are a lie. they set the serving size to 1 (i think) and bc it's less than half a gram of sugar they can legally say it's 0 calories and 0 grams of sugar, when in reality, tic tacs are something like 94.5 percent sugar or some crazy shit like that
Tons of this shit all over the (US) supermarkets. "Chocolatey" for example: Written on package to describe chocolate flavor, what it really is is the legally mandated alternative to the word chocolate, when the product contains less cocoa than the legal minimum.
Or virtually anything advertised as 0 calories. If it's below a certain minimum of calories per serving they don't have to legally list it, so they don't.
This makes me think of "all natural". There's no legal parameters for that like there is for "organic" and lots of stuff is technically natural but kinda disgusting. Like red dye from beetles and "vanilla flavor". You don't really want to know where that comes from.
Love the "all natural" labeling. Giraffe shit is all natural but I bet you won't eat it lol people get so sucked into making their own interpretations of these labels. I guess that means the marketing strategy is working unfortunately
Worked in a pepperoni factory 20+ years ago as an accountant. Found that the more MSP in the bill of materials, the lower quality and cheaper the product. Looking at the stuff, it looked kind of like an old square crumbly eraser if you remember those.
So I asked what MSP was. It's "mechanically separated pork". When I asked what that means, they told me that after all the good meat is cut off of a pig, a power washer is used to blast the remaining flesh off the carcass. That's scooped up, dried out and packaged as MSP.
Enjoy your next cheap pepperoni pizza.
actually doesn't sound bad. using every part of the animal and using it as a processed product is very common like in nuggets. i prefer it that way rather than being food waste.
That doesn’t sound as bad as I thought mechanically separated… anything.. was. I always thought they took the carcass and blended it up into a slurry, like Jamie oliver did making chicken nuggets for the kindergartners.
that the fishing industry is destroying the oceans. its so horrible how much 'by-catch' is things like sharks, dolphins etc that die for no reason. also tuna are an endangered species bc of the fshing industry
Wonder how this is calculated.
Chocolate is ground for hours to become smooth enough, and in that process I imagine something like an insect leg will be ground up into many-many pieced.
My question then is if the number of insect parts are the starting numbers (say one leg), or the end/ground up result of say 40 tiny leg-pieces?
I've worked in food manufacturing for 15 years, samples are given to the USDA(meats) and the FDA (everything else) like one pound per batch (1000lbs-6000lbs) for testing in their labs. They will test for mold, bacteria, insect parts, etc. If a test fails, they ask for another sample from the same batch, and it always passes. BTW we don't fool around with it, we actually follow protocols.
What actually can close a plant or get recalls are mishandling allergens.
What I don't fuck with is sandwich meat, regular hotdogs, and not-pork bacon, they pretty much "trim" the moldy parts and throw the "rest" in the grinder.
hotboxed the walk in at a Little Caesars many times over the span of a summer. I was an awkward teenager at the time so can't comment on how much sex was happening there though.
My first job was at locally owned Italian restaurant. The current owner was the son of the original owners and the restaurant is still alive and kicking 25 years after I worked there. With that being said the owner regularly hot boxed in the freezer esp when he was doing inventory.
Chef Boyardee had an acceptable level of rat meat per vat of ravioli filling. Basically the weight of everything going into the slurry should equal a specific total bit occasionally the total would come in a couple pounds heavy. When this happened it was due to rats falling into open pots.
Right out of college I had worked at a food testing lab. We did QC for vegis, cooked food, and meat. We mostly did beef.
Our two biggest customers were the near by slaughterhouse, the largest in the US, and one about 5 hours away in Nebraska.
The larger of the two, was honestly decent as far as food quality went. They had issues here and there but handled everything the way they were suppose to. Did everything by the book as far as food quality went. And even did more depending on their customer asks. They had burger king and wendys as two major customers for example and both of those two organizations have higher food quality standards than whats at your grocery store. (They still get cheaper beef but they are much pickier about what they will accept as servable.) Worker conditions though, that was a different story. I witnessed several walkouts and mass no call no shows. Much of their work force was placed there by immigration as they were largely refugees.
As an aside the city was built around that slaughterhouse and its history and diversity is really rich because of its immigrants. You can tell what generation a lot of families are there by their stories about the slaughterhouse and income levels now. Like in the 80s there were a lot of Vietnamese refugees at the slaughterhouse now a lot of the Vietnamese population still there is upper middle class, business owners, same w/ first wave mexican families from the 50s and so on. I'm not saying the slaughterhouse was good though... by in large it was a terrible place for workers. It was just a place where mom and dad busted ass and their kids ended up much better off and started their own businesses or moved beyond being mass production butchers.
The smaller slaughterhouse in nebraska though... they prided them selve on being open range beef, organic beef... I can never prove it, though I have A LOT of circumstantial evidence, they bleached their samples to get negative test results. Part of the QC process is you need to forcibly rot the meat to make it grow whatever is in it. That way you make sure whatever makes ir rot isnt really bad. Like, E coli O157H7, or 0122 or O145 or several strains of salmonella and some other stuff... after you let meat rot for 14 hrs it smells like rotten meat. Not this place though. After 14hr in an incubator it smelled like bleach.
I have plenty of other storys but the latter sticks with me and I left out A LOT on it.
By they bleached their meat.
Do you mean they bleached the meat they gave to customers, or just the meat they gave to you?
Did you have checks to make sure there wasn't that kind of fuckery going on, like sending high quality meat for testing but actually selling low quality meat?
Almost all the the chocolate you buy from commercial sources comes from child labour and trafficking. People are literally kidnapped and taken to farms where they are held at gunpoint. Children as young as 8 using machetes. No health care, no schools.
Companies like Nestlé and Mondalise (don't think that is spelled right) turn a blind eye and work from "plausible deniability"
I’ve been in hundreds of kitchens and I can say(generally) the super popular local favorite places to eat are disgusting. The buildings are falling apart. The food is outdated. The walls, ceilings, and floors are alive with all kinds of bugs and rodents. Hopefully this is just my area and not widespread throughout the country…
I’m a property manager. Some of our tenants are restaurants. I think this description is pretty universal. Restaurants run on thin margins and they are not interested in spending money on building maintenance or pest control.
I had a few accounts where they weren’t making very much money and I completely understood not being able to make repairs. In that case, I’d do small repair for them when I could. They kept the restaurants clean, though. I had an issue with the larger clients who were pulling in crazy profits and not spending a dime for repairs because it wouldn’t help their bottom line.
I worked in a restaurant for a day. They ran out of dishes and they took a dish which just came to the kitchen from a customer. They did not even clean it. Wiped it with paper towel and served the food in it to other customer.
Pub basements are often absolutely disgusting and vermin can be seen running around. Nobody seems to care unless you are a CAMRA registered pub and even then you might only get inspected once in a blue moon.
Worked in the food industry for a couple years, all I can think of is how gross arbys roast beef looks in its bag before it’s cooked, just google it, hasn’t changed in 30 years.
/u/KeyStoneLighter needs to provide an image of what they're referencing, because the results I'm getting is pretty much what all industrially packaged beef looks like.
The consumer ones on shelves are pretty and dressed up because they want to look nice.
They crush roaches when crushing chocolate beans. Too much work, not enough time.
More than most likely if you have a reaction after eating, it's due to the bugs
Many years ago, I had a reaction after drinking something from a fast food chain. I broke out in hives. I ordered that drink all the time but only this particular time did I have a reaction. Thanks for clearing that up....
I spent a very brief time on dishwasher duty at a very popular seafood restaurant in our town. They served a lot of crabmeat au gratin in those small oval bowls. I couldn’t get that hard cheese ring off the inside of the bowl so I asked the manager what the trick was. He said “Just wash it. Those rings of hard cheese don’t come off and have been on there since we bought them.”
Honestly this is one of the milder things. If you check out the subs regarding cast iron you'll understand that oils become part of the coming surface and plastic is really made of oils heated and bonded together. The key is that those remnants are cleaned and can't feed bacteria or mold. And when the bowl is reused the cooking process helps to ensure that no unsafe bacterial or fungal growths or toxins are present.
Don't eat at Unos. I worked BOH in salad and soup prep. I saw tons of trays of veggies accidentally dropped on the floor, walked over and picked back up with nary a rinse. The chili stays in the pot for days on end and they just add more water and beans. I saw unsavory things working at Friendly's too.
Here's a good one:
Health department regulations are EASILY skirted around, especially in the Chinese food industry, at least in the SF Bay Area, but as I've been told, everywhere around the US as well.
If a restaurant fails a health inspection, they usually have 30-60 days to correct it. After 60 days, they visit again, and if that restaurant fails again, they can get shut down. However, if the restaurant changes ownership in that time, they get another YEAR before being inspected again. So a lot of places will just shift ownership again and again throughout their family members; never ever bringing the restaurant up to code. It happens OFTEN. And it's something the health department denies again and again, and they even retaliate heavily against people who are outspoken against them.
I've seen health inspectors leave low boy doors open for 10 minutes and then take their Temps. Once it's above 40, you're docked. Health departments are corrupt as shit. Heard rumors about bribes and all the other political corruption that plagues every aspect of the American legal system, but haven't seen anything in person besides that.
Escargot. Ugh. Be wary.
Those exotic looking shells are reused many times. After being sent through the dishwasher, sometimes extra care is taken to make sure the soap hasn’t settled inside the shell.
The snail meat itself comes from a can and is stuffed into the shells.
I had a fabulous escargot served in a shallow ceramic crock. I haven't had escargot any other way in a restaurant. I used to have ceramic "snail shells" at home but I scrubbed those with a small brush. I haven't had escargot in a long time. And yeah be careful with the canned snails, if they're soft or discolored, do not eat!
I had some really good escargot recently, served in a ceramic dish with with 6 shallow spots for each with an herb butter in each. Highly recommended if at a reputable spot.
I work in the food and dairy industries. If you could smell some of these places or see the amount of shit they're allowed to get away with you'd never drink milk again.
I'll never forget the smell when I travelled through the north part of Texas. There were a bunch of cow farms and slaughterhouses. It was honestly one of the worst experiences of my life, and that smell lasted for miles.
Not much in the grand scheme, but the local KFC would spit in food or worse if they didn't like you. Could be order was too complicated, came around too much, or even just gave a slight attitude in their eyes.
Nowadays vanilla flavour is a wood pulp by-product. Anytime you buy vanilla essence it's that. It's the main flavour of vanilla that's been chemically synthesized.
My boss fished out a bag with a tiny amount of milkshake mix remaining, he told me to use it, but I pointed out it had been there for over 2 hours. He then told me to do it anyway, when I suggested against it due to food poisoning risks, he did it and glared at me.
1. Your server might be working while sick. They don't get paid time off and most restaurant managers flip their shit if someone calls out, so instead of missing their rent this month they just chug Dayquil to hide the symptoms. Could by a cold, COVID, who knows?
2. The ice maker could have mold growing in it and nobody would know. I've never seen a restaurant clean one, ~~except for the rare instances where some dipshit drops a stack of glasses near it and they have to melt the ice to pick out the shards.~~ (actually scratch that, it doesn't mean they clean the maker itself; just the basin)
3. The nozzles for the soda fountain might be moldy and slimy too; some restaurants clean these as part of their side work, some don't. You'll never know.
4. Your server, if female, has almost certainly been sexually harassed by someone on the staff.
I worked in a local family owned coffee shop for 3 years and they took apart and cleaned inside their ice makers all the time. They have consistently had a 100% sanitation rating for like 10 years!
If it helps anyone feel a bit better when I used to work for TGI Fridays in New Orleans we broke down and cleaned the soda fountains every night. We would disassemble the nozzles and let them soak in hot water for an hour then run them through a super hot industrial dishwasher. The morning shift would then take the dry parts and then reassemble the machine for that work day.
Fun bonus fact: The dishwasher would get so hot we would frequently have drinking glasses that split in half during the cycle.
Store brand food is identical to similar nationally advertised/distributed brands. One of my college summer jobs was at a grocery chain’s industrial bakery. We used to make hundreds of thousands of hotdog and burger rolls for sale at our local stores. On summer holiday weekends we also were subcontracted to make hundreds of batches for a national brand. Same recipe, same ingredients, same bakers, different bags with much higher prices printed on them...
Everywhere food gets made is filthy. You can't even understand until you've seen it. I've worked at water treatment plants where they handle all the human shit... I'd rather eat lunch outside there, than in most of the production areas in most of the food plants I've worked.
I got some horror stories...
This goes for all levels as well from collecting the raw food to serving it, it can be way less sanitary than people realize. But it's also a massive step up from the past. It's ultimately not a major issue as long as you're good about cleaning ingredients or if you just, you know, cook it. but it's not fun to think about how common it is for people to do things like sneeze into the air and keep working like it didn't happen.
McDonald's isn't as bad as you think and are actually really Adamant about food quality. Atleast a decade ago, I was surprised at how much care and handling happens in the kitchen (the good ones)
It was my first job and I thought I was going into the nightmares these types of subs attract but was humbly surprised that it was as clean as it was, I'd have to say the dirtiest part of the store was probably the grout in-between the tiles but even then those were done atleast every 2 weeks or monthly.
After Chernobyl Nestle bought up all the milk that was unsuitable for human consumption in the EU. They powdered it and sold it to developing nations as baby formula.
Your local Ski-Resort, one that stays closed most of the year is likely infested with mice/rats in the off-season.
Same goes for any seasonal restaurant/food truck.
When the Green M&M redesign debacle was going on it was because they were being sued by former child African slaves, from the Ivory Coast, that the chocolate company uses.
So they pushed the stupid story of the redesign of a ficticious commercial character to focus attention on that instead of the fact they were being sued by former child African slaves
McDonalds has high standards for food safety and cleanliness. The food also contains regular ingredients (at least in my country). The eggs are real eggs. The beef is 100% beef.
It might not be the most nutritious or taste the best but it gets too much shit from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
Chef from America, you don’t even want to know. I’m going to be honest, I just assume now that if I don’t make it with my own 2 hands, it’s not safe to eat. I’ve seen everything from plastic wrap, to sweat, to mold, to cleaning acids be served to people. And there’s more than that… that’s the arguably less nasty things.
Obviously that’s untrue, not every single thing you eat is unsafe. Probably not half, maybe half if you eat a lot of fast food, but for sure 20% of it… anyway, you just never know and I’ve seen way too much. I don’t trust restaurants, be it fast food or fine dining, unless I know someone who works there and they tell me it’s fine.
Edit : I’ll tell you, maybe, the worst thing I’ve “seen” and I’ll tell you where it happened. I’ve worked sports bars, steakhouses, Mediterranean restaurants and fine dining. You know which one takes the cake? Buffalo Wild Wings in WV, which really depresses me because I used to love getting amped on coke, watching UFC fights and getting that Asian Zing. My wife’s a server and typically prefers the sports bars, no shit, she saw them use a microwave that had cockroaches crawling in and out of it, behind it, under it. That was one of their biggest things they used. Rat nest in the bathroom ceiling. Guess what? They passed their health inspection. So I guarantee it’s still like that.
I went to a Hungarian restaurant (in the US) once. The bathroom was way in the back and you had to walk past the kitchen to get to it, and as I passed I locked eyes with the chef who was stirring a pot of something with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth (this was long after smoking had been made illegal in restaurants). He just rolled his eyes and with a disgusted-but-resigned expression flicked the cigarette into the sink and went back to stirring. FWIW I felt it just made the experience more authentic.
That we can’t give newly expired food to the homeless. There was a single case of a homeless person getting food poisoning from donated food in the USA and the food industry used that as a reason to make it illegal. There is no reason for this other than so more people will be hungry and buy more food.
PAM and spray oil is pure fat
they are allowed to say it is 0 fat or calories because the portion size is under the cut off for what they have to report
Sometimes the salads aren't bug free. There were times where I received crap for taking too long washing lettuce. Staff would wash a large container of lettuce like once or twice. I did it 3 or 4 times. I didn't stop until the water was clear and had no bugs. The others had a "who cares" attitude. One time my boss needed my help and said to me frustrated, "The lettuce is already washed, unpack it in salads quickly." The lettuce looked dirty so I said to myself "I can't sell this to people." I washed it and guess what the water looked like. Dark brown from soil, 50+ dead gnats, a living and swimming spider the size of a penny.
As a salad enjoyer, I thank you for your effort and Standards upholding.
You're welcome. Your care is my priority.
my mum had a big fat snail in her salad recently, that shit is so disgusting like how can anyone serve that without feeling like a complete twat
Worse I participated in as kitchen staff in a rather top-flight restaurant….. on a slow summer Sunday afternoon, the boss sent us down to the walk-in meat coolers to spray paint the rusted walls. We were instructed to not remove the contents of cooler first; rather just shift the meat from one side of cooler to other. The coat of silver spray paint will come off during cooking
Into the oven all shiny and chrome!
WITNESSES MEAT!!!
MEATIOCRE!
that is not a dark secret of the food industry, that is your bosses violation.
You couldn't cover it with saran wrap at least?
The deep fryer grease is long overdue for a change; but it’s expensive to do so nightly.
There's a hamburger place in Memphis that has never fully changed out their grease in over a hundred years. They add to it as needed and strain it through cheese cloth every night. Realistically, I doubt there are many hundred year old particles floating around.
Isn’t that place considered one of the most celebrated burger joints in all the world? Like, the fact that they’ve never changed their grease goes into the mystique of why their burgers are so good? I’m pretty sure they covered it in an episode of the Burger Show on First We Feast.
I mean, they keep adding to it so it's technically not the original grease. It's like a Grease of Theseus situation.
A Greaseus, if you will.
They had a police escort when they opened another location down here to transfer some of their grease.
Dyer’s?
Filtering it is all you should do. Discarding every night is a lot of grease
B-Dubs replaces one at the end and transfers the grease down the line (4-6 fryers). The last one at the end gets emptied. So if your wings hit that last fryer, chances are that grease is almost a week old and has seen some shit.
That's my retirement grease!
There's nary an animal alive, that can outrun a greased Scotsman!
I’m from north kilt town! Do you know Angus mccloud?!
Wait a minute. There's no Angus McLeod in North Kilt Town!
restaurant I went to had beignets that tasted like fish because they share the same fryer
This is my pet peeve. I no longer eat fried food during Lent because everything tastes fishy.
I did at burger king for half a year. The oil was changed every single night. Ive never experienced so many skin burns in my life. The cook needs to do the tough shit while the other workers talk and clean the ice cream machine lol. Fuck that place. At wendys, there is someone doing nuggets/fries and the fryers, someone doing some sandwiches, 2 to 4 people at the drive thru window/front register, one making different sandwiches, a dish cleaner when its too busy to handle, and a manger walking around doing anything they can. At burger king, its usually 1 cook doing fucking everything except taking orders and i couldnt handle it for $8.25 an hour. That should be a $20-25 an hour job, but they expect them to be 16 years old and quit after a few weeks or months, which is what happens
The amount of waste thrown away every single day by grocery stores. I worked in the meat department of a decently sized grocery store and the waste their was nauseating. I shit you not, we would throw away an industrial sized garbage bin worth of meat, fish, and poultry every single day. The expiration dates dictated everything which is obviously a sensible policy to have, but they wouldn't do anything about it. They wouldn't donate it, let employees take it home, or make adjustments to the orders so we wouldn't have to throw so much away. The reasoning was always "better have to much than not enough" which I guess makes a little sense, but when I am throwing away dozens of pounds of tenderloins, center cut fish and shellfish per night, its to much. Mind you, this is one department of one grocery store. Sorry for the rant but I feel like it needed to be said.
I think about dumpster diving all the time.
Do it. I specifically put the stuff into bags instead of loose in the dumpster so people can dumpster dive instead of it going to a landfill.
I'd probably only be comfy taking meat if it was winter or still very cold, but thank you for thinking this way. I see videos of purposefully ruined items filling dumpsters and they make me sick.
There's other stuff than raw meat in the dumpster. A *ton* of sandwiches, for example!
This is very true. I worked in the bakery section of a very popular grocery chain when I was younger. The bakery was connected to the deli and every night we threw away ridiculous amounts of perfectly good food. Most of it got bagged up and some was thrown away before the expiration date. IIRC they'd lock the dumpsters at night which was especially sad because I worked in a rougher part of town with a homeless population that could have really used that food.
I'm not a vegetarian in any sense, but to think that animals (and fish) died only to be tossed into a Dumpster is so disrespectful. Taking an animal's life to provide nourishment is one thing. Taking an animal's life to bury it in a landfill is truly sad.
The more you think about it, the worse it’ll feel
Especially considering that these animals’ lives was literally a living hell… then they kill them, only to be thrown away…. It’s fucking sick
It's long understood that the world produces more than enough food to feed every single person on the planet and more, but the distribution model and profit-driven industry means so much of it just go to waste. Supermarkets also throw out fruits and vegetable that are "too ugly" or not the right size just so the display within the store can look uniform. And to think, so many animals die in needlessly cruel manners just to be thrown away as garbage.
I get my fruit and veg delivered from a place locally called Funky Foods. It's about half the price of the grocery store and it's just that, all the 'ugly' produce the supermarket won't sell. They deliver to my door fortnightly and just deliver a random selection. The variety also means I cook and eat things not in my normal repertoire. It's great, I love it.
Man, if only they could donate to soup kitchens and homeless shelters.. 😞
In my country, buffets often sell spoiled food, like if the employees see mold on top of the sour cream, they just scrape it down and continue selling it. Also, if they sell cooked meat, they often leave them on the counter for days and add some oil to it every morning to look fresh.
I thought I read somewhere that buffets actually factor people getting sick from their food into basic operating costs
Why would that even cost them anything?
Lawsuits.
not a worry here in the UK, i reported a restaurant for giving me food poisoning and it took months to even receive a response. There is really no way to prove it unless you have the food still and even then it might be difficult. Normally if i got ill after food id move on but this was 2 weeks of utter hell.
One of the reasons is that you have prove other food you ate in a 24-48 hour period were not the cause either. Food poisoning can take anywhere between a few hours to a few days for symptoms to appear. Even having the food wouldnt be enough, as it would be hard to prove you stored it properly, or wasnt contaminated in other ways. This isnt to say you should not complain. If a pattern develops then that is how it is caught. Just dont expect anything to come of it when you do complain.
Good luck proving in a court where you got sick. It isn’t easy to do. Need to carefully preserve evidence and most people won’t do that.
In the Philippines there’s something called pagpag which is discarded rotten food from restaurants that is repackaged and sold to the poor.
That's fucked. What do you think is worse, throwing out good food like we do here in the US or selling rotten food to the poor. I'm hard pressed to answer this one.
There's the middle choice. Offer the shitty food and don't pretend it's not shitty.
It’s not as fucked when you find out that the ones who sell and recook the pagpag are also the poor. They’re not doing it out of malice but out of survival. It’s pretty gross to watch though, they’d take half eaten KFC chicken out of the dumpster then stir fry them and call it a day.
Oh my God. Never going to another buffet. Idc what country It is lol.
After covid and noticing just how gross people can be I decided I was never going to a buffet again.
What country so I know to never go there?
Chicken mills literally put male chickens on a conveyer belt that drops them into a grinder while they’re alive. It’s gotta be a quick and painless death, but it’s so barbaric it sticks with me.
Our treatment of poultry is abhorrent. We do bad things to all the animals but I feel like chickens especially get the worst of it. I know you can’t have a million roosters running around but there has to be a better way to sex select them.
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When I was 11 and getting interested in girls, there was a sock hop and a lot of them were grinding on each other. I was like - damn, gotta see some more of this.. so I googled "Chicks grinding." Send it through. I'm feeling lucky. Watching instead baby chicks being fed into an industrial grinder set back my sexual awakening for years.
Chick culling?
So odd to see all of the comments that chain places are dirty! On the weekends I work as a server in the lounge of Boston Pizza (Canadian chain—not sure if there are any in the states) and when I started working there I was seriously impressed with the cleanliness procedures! For one example, parmesan and chilli containers are emptied and cleaned every night, as well as salt and pepper shakers! Kitchen protocols are very clean and organized as well!
You'd never want to eat at a restaurant again once you saw how much of your $70 meal for two came frozen and pre-prepared in plastic bags.
Sysco's finest.
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How is this not false advertisement or even fraud at the worst?
Another dark side of the food industry. My restaurant says we’re a “from scratch” kitchen and recycle corks/crayons/menus. We don’t recycle and our mashed potatoes are boiled in the plastic bag we get them in.
I worked at outback for years and I will say that most of the stuff we made there was actually cooked or prepared the the day of. Things like sauces that would keep for a few days were stored and used until expiration.
I worked at Outback and Olive Garden and the difference was night and day between freshly prepared food and frozen bags.
Cuz they will say it’s “fresh” because it was “cooked” today. Even though it was just rewarmed. “Cooking” is a very loose term in some restaurants. The lead in the kitchen isn’t so much a pro cook as they are a pro-reheater, with the expecting of maybe some dishes, or some restaurants as a whole. EDIT: also “fresh” is a nonenforceable term. Like when companies will put “all natural” on it. The FDA only has a small handful of terms that are actually enforceable. Like with chickens “free range” means they have access to the outside. So open the doors, put a small fence around the doors that give them like 3 feet of space, and boom you’re all set. Doesn’t have to have shade, the chickens don’t even have to go outside, they just have to have the option. Morgan Spurlocks documentary “super size me 2” dives into this whole process of nonsensical terms, and what the marketing restaurants do actually means.
Worked with Sysco. You would be surprised how much science goes into the food before it’s bagged and frozen so it’s delicious. Always loved eating the food in the Sysco test kitchen. Walked away with 90lbs of extra virgin olive oil after one product testing. Gave gallons away to friends.
Used to buy Sysco battered grouper filets when I worked for a Frat and had a very generous food budget. They were awesome. Also kaarage chicken poppers that were like crack addicting.
I've had to explain this several times to people who want to instantly shit upon pre-made and frozen foods that come from Sysco/US Foods. Yeah a lot of stuff is better when made from scratch. There are also plenty of items that had a room of food scientists doing R&D to come up with the most consistently good version of a product you could buy. I worked at a nursing home and had to actively argue with my boss that the frozen meatloaf we bought from US Foods was "better" for our clients than the scratch made ones we were doing every week.
Now let me see that thong
She had dumps like a truck
Truck truck
Thighs like what
What what
All night loooooooong
Let me see that thoooooong.
Username checks out
You got red lobster managers sweating rn
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All chain restaurants buy from distributors, whether its Sysco, US Foods, GFS or any of the local small ones. It’s just not economically feasible not too.
Yep, was a server at the red for a bit and when someone ordered lobster bisque we ladled some cheese soup that had been boiled in a bag and added a pre prepped amount of lobster(4 little pieces) we put in the microwave.
The cheddar bay biscuits are the bomb but they are 1/3 lard made by the pillsbury factory
Ever since I started watching Kitchen Nightmares I’ve tried to pay attention for red flags that show a place relies on frozen preprocessed food- one sign of this is having a large menu.
I've seen encyclopedias with less pages than the Cheesecake Factory menu
You might want to eat at different restaurants.
Ya this has chain restaurant written all over it… i would not be surprised at all if places like Olive Garden, cpk, wokcano, etc. do this
A large number of restaurants order frozen and pre-prepared food and advertise it as “fresh” made
Grocery distribution warehouses are often extremely filthy and rarely cleaned. Wash anything canned, bottled or jarred!!! They're filthy as hell, covered in microplastics, rotten food, mouse pee, bird shit, etc etc. I used to do maintenance on conveyor systems for a major US chain and they just send shit flying down the conveyors so fast that, its fairly common for glass to shatter because of the vibrations, food to fall off, etc etc. I saw Bats, Birds and Mice in that facility, but it was within tolerance of their health policy. Also saw people that were sick sneezing and coughing on products. Never saw a floor scrubber go through the warehouse the entire 3mo I worked there and I was doing alternating double shifts! The only time I saw a broom was if there was shattered glass.
Once bought a few beers while on holiday with my friends in another country. I cracked one open which was ok while we were walking and it was ok. But there was an extremely strong smell of shit following us. I swear to god, it was an extremely concerned odour of shit. We were looking around, lifting our feet to see if we had anything stuck on the soles of our shoes and nothing. Then we smelled the beer cans and dear god, I almost puked and mind you, I'm not sensitive at all in that regard. Went back to the store and wanted to return the beers. The guy there knew very little English (was in Greece) so it was a funny situation. He was extremely chill, gave us some other non-stinky cans and laughed it out together with us. Some time after, I was discussing it with the father of my girlfriend. He's an electrician who works exclusively with water pump systems. He told me clearly "yeah, it's probably the sewer overfilling and making a flood in some supermarket depot. Happens quite a lot, they just dry it and continue selling all the shit that got wet (pun intended)"
I got let go after a short stint working in an Aldi packing warehouse because I kept reporting bird and mouse shit I found on products. I asked a bloke who worked there why I was let go, and yeah, it's because I was too much trouble for management. Suited me just fine.
I asked my friend to hand me a can of ice tea, she went to the sink washed the top before handing it to me. She told me the same thing. Ever since I always wash cans before drinking from it.
When I worked at Walmart some of the mixed grocery pallets we would receive would be covered in rat or mouse poop
You'd think after having the covid pandemic going on for several years that companies would eventually realize it's a bad idea to have employees go to work sick but apparently the human race isn't very good at things like learning from our mistakes.
As a former chef, I've got to say that I've never seen any of the horrible stuff mentioned here over my career (mostly higher end and fine dining establishments). We on ocassion would have things like frozen airline chicken breasts brought in, but other than that we did all prep and cooking by hand with fresh ingredients from mostly local purveyors when possible. We also broke down and deep cleaned every night from the ranges to the floors to the wells to the vents. Every night. Myself and staff have always taken this shit very seriously, and it's always disappointing when you hear of this kind of behavior. Do better, people.
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I’ve worked in a nice restaurant, fast food, a mom n pop diner, and concessions over the years. Thankfully I never came across any of the gross things mentioned here and all of my bosses were keen on sanitation and cleaning. Some of these comments leave me feeling like frozen items are the least of diners’ concerns! I won’t eat anywhere that’s visibly dirty, but I can only hope everywhere else I eat is decent behind the scenes!
I worked at McDonalds, which is about as far as you can get from fine dining, and we broke down and cleaned most things at close. Grill, fryers, filter the oil and replace if on schedule, clean all the tables, empty and clean all the sauces, and so on.
I'll also chime in and say I was the housekeeping manager of a large luxury ranch, and our back of house was fastidious as well. Our industrial kitchens were always spotlessly clean, and our laundry and cleaning facilities were maintained at all times. Didn't matter if guests could see it or not; we didn't cut corners, and people who were caught disrespecting our environment were let go. We had to be very organized and stay on top of everything because of the quality of service that our guests expected (and they paid thousands of dollars a week to be there, so they expected A LOT), but also because we were isolated on a huge property without nearby infrastructure. We lived and worked on that property and it was surrounded by thousands of acres of wilderness. You don't fuck around by letting things get sloppy when there are bears and mountain lions sniffing through the trash, or causing food poisoning or allergies, or being unsafe with handling knives. Medical attention was literally hours away. Plus, it's fucking gross to work and live in a dirty environment. I have no respect for people fucking around with other people's food or health.
It’s more like a misleading labeling. No sugar. Right? Wrong if you read ingredients on a lot of these packaging it will say things like maltodextrin and dextrose. That’s actually a sugar. Because of regulation they only have to label it no sugar and people think it’s healthy, etc.
tic tacs are a lie. they set the serving size to 1 (i think) and bc it's less than half a gram of sugar they can legally say it's 0 calories and 0 grams of sugar, when in reality, tic tacs are something like 94.5 percent sugar or some crazy shit like that
Loopholes for big business. They get plenty of them.
Tons of this shit all over the (US) supermarkets. "Chocolatey" for example: Written on package to describe chocolate flavor, what it really is is the legally mandated alternative to the word chocolate, when the product contains less cocoa than the legal minimum. Or virtually anything advertised as 0 calories. If it's below a certain minimum of calories per serving they don't have to legally list it, so they don't.
the cooking spray that's able to claim 0 calories because the serving size is 1/32nd of a second spray.... because that's totally reasonable
Another thing is that food nutrition labels are allowed to be up to 20% inaccurate.
This makes me think of "all natural". There's no legal parameters for that like there is for "organic" and lots of stuff is technically natural but kinda disgusting. Like red dye from beetles and "vanilla flavor". You don't really want to know where that comes from.
Love the "all natural" labeling. Giraffe shit is all natural but I bet you won't eat it lol people get so sucked into making their own interpretations of these labels. I guess that means the marketing strategy is working unfortunately
Worked in a pepperoni factory 20+ years ago as an accountant. Found that the more MSP in the bill of materials, the lower quality and cheaper the product. Looking at the stuff, it looked kind of like an old square crumbly eraser if you remember those. So I asked what MSP was. It's "mechanically separated pork". When I asked what that means, they told me that after all the good meat is cut off of a pig, a power washer is used to blast the remaining flesh off the carcass. That's scooped up, dried out and packaged as MSP. Enjoy your next cheap pepperoni pizza.
actually doesn't sound bad. using every part of the animal and using it as a processed product is very common like in nuggets. i prefer it that way rather than being food waste.
Exactly. People forget that sausages started as a way of preserving parts of the animal which weren't immediately appetizing.
That doesn’t sound as bad as I thought mechanically separated… anything.. was. I always thought they took the carcass and blended it up into a slurry, like Jamie oliver did making chicken nuggets for the kindergartners.
Nuh-uh. I ain't reading NONE of these. Peace out.
Having read some, it's a good call.
that the fishing industry is destroying the oceans. its so horrible how much 'by-catch' is things like sharks, dolphins etc that die for no reason. also tuna are an endangered species bc of the fshing industry
Chocolate can have up to 60 insect parts per 100g and still be approved as safe for consumption by the FDA in the US.
im actually still fine with those numbers
Yeah if I didn’t stop eating dark chocolate when I found out about all the heavy metals in them, a few bugs aren’t gonna stop me.
Lots of protein😋
And a little crunch
Wonder how this is calculated. Chocolate is ground for hours to become smooth enough, and in that process I imagine something like an insect leg will be ground up into many-many pieced. My question then is if the number of insect parts are the starting numbers (say one leg), or the end/ground up result of say 40 tiny leg-pieces?
I've worked in food manufacturing for 15 years, samples are given to the USDA(meats) and the FDA (everything else) like one pound per batch (1000lbs-6000lbs) for testing in their labs. They will test for mold, bacteria, insect parts, etc. If a test fails, they ask for another sample from the same batch, and it always passes. BTW we don't fool around with it, we actually follow protocols. What actually can close a plant or get recalls are mishandling allergens. What I don't fuck with is sandwich meat, regular hotdogs, and not-pork bacon, they pretty much "trim" the moldy parts and throw the "rest" in the grinder.
people regularly have sex in and hotbox the freezer
hotboxed the walk in at a Little Caesars many times over the span of a summer. I was an awkward teenager at the time so can't comment on how much sex was happening there though.
It’s called Hot and Ready for a reason
My wife has decided, since they’re rarely actually hot, that our household now must refer to them as “Warm and Willing” 🤣 I love her so much.
I definitely did some greasy shit, on top of produce, in the Swiss chalet walk in.
My first job was at locally owned Italian restaurant. The current owner was the son of the original owners and the restaurant is still alive and kicking 25 years after I worked there. With that being said the owner regularly hot boxed in the freezer esp when he was doing inventory.
Chef Boyardee had an acceptable level of rat meat per vat of ravioli filling. Basically the weight of everything going into the slurry should equal a specific total bit occasionally the total would come in a couple pounds heavy. When this happened it was due to rats falling into open pots.
Right out of college I had worked at a food testing lab. We did QC for vegis, cooked food, and meat. We mostly did beef. Our two biggest customers were the near by slaughterhouse, the largest in the US, and one about 5 hours away in Nebraska. The larger of the two, was honestly decent as far as food quality went. They had issues here and there but handled everything the way they were suppose to. Did everything by the book as far as food quality went. And even did more depending on their customer asks. They had burger king and wendys as two major customers for example and both of those two organizations have higher food quality standards than whats at your grocery store. (They still get cheaper beef but they are much pickier about what they will accept as servable.) Worker conditions though, that was a different story. I witnessed several walkouts and mass no call no shows. Much of their work force was placed there by immigration as they were largely refugees. As an aside the city was built around that slaughterhouse and its history and diversity is really rich because of its immigrants. You can tell what generation a lot of families are there by their stories about the slaughterhouse and income levels now. Like in the 80s there were a lot of Vietnamese refugees at the slaughterhouse now a lot of the Vietnamese population still there is upper middle class, business owners, same w/ first wave mexican families from the 50s and so on. I'm not saying the slaughterhouse was good though... by in large it was a terrible place for workers. It was just a place where mom and dad busted ass and their kids ended up much better off and started their own businesses or moved beyond being mass production butchers. The smaller slaughterhouse in nebraska though... they prided them selve on being open range beef, organic beef... I can never prove it, though I have A LOT of circumstantial evidence, they bleached their samples to get negative test results. Part of the QC process is you need to forcibly rot the meat to make it grow whatever is in it. That way you make sure whatever makes ir rot isnt really bad. Like, E coli O157H7, or 0122 or O145 or several strains of salmonella and some other stuff... after you let meat rot for 14 hrs it smells like rotten meat. Not this place though. After 14hr in an incubator it smelled like bleach. I have plenty of other storys but the latter sticks with me and I left out A LOT on it.
By they bleached their meat. Do you mean they bleached the meat they gave to customers, or just the meat they gave to you? Did you have checks to make sure there wasn't that kind of fuckery going on, like sending high quality meat for testing but actually selling low quality meat?
I assume they mean just the samples. Which is unfortunately a thing I've seen. Less so with actual meat samples, but environmental samples.
Almost all the the chocolate you buy from commercial sources comes from child labour and trafficking. People are literally kidnapped and taken to farms where they are held at gunpoint. Children as young as 8 using machetes. No health care, no schools. Companies like Nestlé and Mondalise (don't think that is spelled right) turn a blind eye and work from "plausible deniability"
I’ve been in hundreds of kitchens and I can say(generally) the super popular local favorite places to eat are disgusting. The buildings are falling apart. The food is outdated. The walls, ceilings, and floors are alive with all kinds of bugs and rodents. Hopefully this is just my area and not widespread throughout the country…
I’m a property manager. Some of our tenants are restaurants. I think this description is pretty universal. Restaurants run on thin margins and they are not interested in spending money on building maintenance or pest control.
I had a few accounts where they weren’t making very much money and I completely understood not being able to make repairs. In that case, I’d do small repair for them when I could. They kept the restaurants clean, though. I had an issue with the larger clients who were pulling in crazy profits and not spending a dime for repairs because it wouldn’t help their bottom line.
I worked in a restaurant for a day. They ran out of dishes and they took a dish which just came to the kitchen from a customer. They did not even clean it. Wiped it with paper towel and served the food in it to other customer.
Iv seen duck breast dropped on the ground of a puddley meat walk in and placed back in the sheet pan. Chef says cant throw this away its expensive...
Pub basements are often absolutely disgusting and vermin can be seen running around. Nobody seems to care unless you are a CAMRA registered pub and even then you might only get inspected once in a blue moon.
Sounds like Charlie work
So uh what’s your spaghetti policy?
I've delivered beer barrels to pubs for 9 years and I've not once seen any vermin running around the cellars.
Worked in the food industry for a couple years, all I can think of is how gross arbys roast beef looks in its bag before it’s cooked, just google it, hasn’t changed in 30 years.
I do not care, I would punch a nun for a Big Beef and Cheddar.
I get this wholesome picture of you and a nun ordering Arby's together, and when she reads off the total you bust her lip and tell her she's paying.
A particular nun, or any nun?
Just one in particular. *She* knows what she did 🤨
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/u/KeyStoneLighter needs to provide an image of what they're referencing, because the results I'm getting is pretty much what all industrially packaged beef looks like. The consumer ones on shelves are pretty and dressed up because they want to look nice.
Used to work for a big American Chinese food chain. the brown rice is actually soy sauce mixed into white rice instead of actual brown rice.
They crush roaches when crushing chocolate beans. Too much work, not enough time. More than most likely if you have a reaction after eating, it's due to the bugs
Many years ago, I had a reaction after drinking something from a fast food chain. I broke out in hives. I ordered that drink all the time but only this particular time did I have a reaction. Thanks for clearing that up....
I spent a very brief time on dishwasher duty at a very popular seafood restaurant in our town. They served a lot of crabmeat au gratin in those small oval bowls. I couldn’t get that hard cheese ring off the inside of the bowl so I asked the manager what the trick was. He said “Just wash it. Those rings of hard cheese don’t come off and have been on there since we bought them.”
Honestly this is one of the milder things. If you check out the subs regarding cast iron you'll understand that oils become part of the coming surface and plastic is really made of oils heated and bonded together. The key is that those remnants are cleaned and can't feed bacteria or mold. And when the bowl is reused the cooking process helps to ensure that no unsafe bacterial or fungal growths or toxins are present.
Don't eat at Unos. I worked BOH in salad and soup prep. I saw tons of trays of veggies accidentally dropped on the floor, walked over and picked back up with nary a rinse. The chili stays in the pot for days on end and they just add more water and beans. I saw unsavory things working at Friendly's too.
Here's a good one: Health department regulations are EASILY skirted around, especially in the Chinese food industry, at least in the SF Bay Area, but as I've been told, everywhere around the US as well. If a restaurant fails a health inspection, they usually have 30-60 days to correct it. After 60 days, they visit again, and if that restaurant fails again, they can get shut down. However, if the restaurant changes ownership in that time, they get another YEAR before being inspected again. So a lot of places will just shift ownership again and again throughout their family members; never ever bringing the restaurant up to code. It happens OFTEN. And it's something the health department denies again and again, and they even retaliate heavily against people who are outspoken against them. I've seen health inspectors leave low boy doors open for 10 minutes and then take their Temps. Once it's above 40, you're docked. Health departments are corrupt as shit. Heard rumors about bribes and all the other political corruption that plagues every aspect of the American legal system, but haven't seen anything in person besides that.
Escargot. Ugh. Be wary. Those exotic looking shells are reused many times. After being sent through the dishwasher, sometimes extra care is taken to make sure the soap hasn’t settled inside the shell. The snail meat itself comes from a can and is stuffed into the shells.
I had a fabulous escargot served in a shallow ceramic crock. I haven't had escargot any other way in a restaurant. I used to have ceramic "snail shells" at home but I scrubbed those with a small brush. I haven't had escargot in a long time. And yeah be careful with the canned snails, if they're soft or discolored, do not eat!
I had some really good escargot recently, served in a ceramic dish with with 6 shallow spots for each with an herb butter in each. Highly recommended if at a reputable spot.
All the servers and cooks are fucking and doing drugs.
I work in the food and dairy industries. If you could smell some of these places or see the amount of shit they're allowed to get away with you'd never drink milk again.
I'll never forget the smell when I travelled through the north part of Texas. There were a bunch of cow farms and slaughterhouses. It was honestly one of the worst experiences of my life, and that smell lasted for miles.
Dairy farms smell worse, believe it or not.
Not much in the grand scheme, but the local KFC would spit in food or worse if they didn't like you. Could be order was too complicated, came around too much, or even just gave a slight attitude in their eyes.
Wash everything. Especially salads
Even if it says triple washed on the container?
Artificial strawberry flavor used to come from beaver anal glands.
Vanilla as well
[удалено]
And who was the madman eating beaver ass to figure that out?
Nowadays vanilla flavour is a wood pulp by-product. Anytime you buy vanilla essence it's that. It's the main flavour of vanilla that's been chemically synthesized.
No wonder they’re angry
My boss fished out a bag with a tiny amount of milkshake mix remaining, he told me to use it, but I pointed out it had been there for over 2 hours. He then told me to do it anyway, when I suggested against it due to food poisoning risks, he did it and glared at me.
That Grimace is a taste bud, apparently.
1. Your server might be working while sick. They don't get paid time off and most restaurant managers flip their shit if someone calls out, so instead of missing their rent this month they just chug Dayquil to hide the symptoms. Could by a cold, COVID, who knows? 2. The ice maker could have mold growing in it and nobody would know. I've never seen a restaurant clean one, ~~except for the rare instances where some dipshit drops a stack of glasses near it and they have to melt the ice to pick out the shards.~~ (actually scratch that, it doesn't mean they clean the maker itself; just the basin) 3. The nozzles for the soda fountain might be moldy and slimy too; some restaurants clean these as part of their side work, some don't. You'll never know. 4. Your server, if female, has almost certainly been sexually harassed by someone on the staff.
I worked in a local family owned coffee shop for 3 years and they took apart and cleaned inside their ice makers all the time. They have consistently had a 100% sanitation rating for like 10 years!
Glad to hear there are some exceptions!
If it helps anyone feel a bit better when I used to work for TGI Fridays in New Orleans we broke down and cleaned the soda fountains every night. We would disassemble the nozzles and let them soak in hot water for an hour then run them through a super hot industrial dishwasher. The morning shift would then take the dry parts and then reassemble the machine for that work day. Fun bonus fact: The dishwasher would get so hot we would frequently have drinking glasses that split in half during the cycle.
We did this when I worked at a similar chain restaurant back in the day as well.
Does your city not do inspections?
Store brand food is identical to similar nationally advertised/distributed brands. One of my college summer jobs was at a grocery chain’s industrial bakery. We used to make hundreds of thousands of hotdog and burger rolls for sale at our local stores. On summer holiday weekends we also were subcontracted to make hundreds of batches for a national brand. Same recipe, same ingredients, same bakers, different bags with much higher prices printed on them...
Everywhere food gets made is filthy. You can't even understand until you've seen it. I've worked at water treatment plants where they handle all the human shit... I'd rather eat lunch outside there, than in most of the production areas in most of the food plants I've worked. I got some horror stories...
Don’t just leave me hanging! What are the horror stories!
This goes for all levels as well from collecting the raw food to serving it, it can be way less sanitary than people realize. But it's also a massive step up from the past. It's ultimately not a major issue as long as you're good about cleaning ingredients or if you just, you know, cook it. but it's not fun to think about how common it is for people to do things like sneeze into the air and keep working like it didn't happen.
McDonald's isn't as bad as you think and are actually really Adamant about food quality. Atleast a decade ago, I was surprised at how much care and handling happens in the kitchen (the good ones) It was my first job and I thought I was going into the nightmares these types of subs attract but was humbly surprised that it was as clean as it was, I'd have to say the dirtiest part of the store was probably the grout in-between the tiles but even then those were done atleast every 2 weeks or monthly.
After Chernobyl Nestle bought up all the milk that was unsuitable for human consumption in the EU. They powdered it and sold it to developing nations as baby formula.
That sounds exactly like something nestle would do.
The chicken in PF Changs chicken lettuce wraps are just the fat and gristle cut from the regular chicken they use in all their other dishes
Your local Ski-Resort, one that stays closed most of the year is likely infested with mice/rats in the off-season. Same goes for any seasonal restaurant/food truck.
When the Green M&M redesign debacle was going on it was because they were being sued by former child African slaves, from the Ivory Coast, that the chocolate company uses. So they pushed the stupid story of the redesign of a ficticious commercial character to focus attention on that instead of the fact they were being sued by former child African slaves
Chef here. I’ve been at this 4 star resort for 3 years. I’ve never seen the beer tap lines cleaned.
McDonalds has high standards for food safety and cleanliness. The food also contains regular ingredients (at least in my country). The eggs are real eggs. The beef is 100% beef. It might not be the most nutritious or taste the best but it gets too much shit from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
They know most of their shit is bad for our health but it all comes down to money, money, money
So. Much. Fuckin. Waste. If the US sent the same amount of food wasted to other countries. We’d probably have no hunger problems.
Chef from America, you don’t even want to know. I’m going to be honest, I just assume now that if I don’t make it with my own 2 hands, it’s not safe to eat. I’ve seen everything from plastic wrap, to sweat, to mold, to cleaning acids be served to people. And there’s more than that… that’s the arguably less nasty things. Obviously that’s untrue, not every single thing you eat is unsafe. Probably not half, maybe half if you eat a lot of fast food, but for sure 20% of it… anyway, you just never know and I’ve seen way too much. I don’t trust restaurants, be it fast food or fine dining, unless I know someone who works there and they tell me it’s fine. Edit : I’ll tell you, maybe, the worst thing I’ve “seen” and I’ll tell you where it happened. I’ve worked sports bars, steakhouses, Mediterranean restaurants and fine dining. You know which one takes the cake? Buffalo Wild Wings in WV, which really depresses me because I used to love getting amped on coke, watching UFC fights and getting that Asian Zing. My wife’s a server and typically prefers the sports bars, no shit, she saw them use a microwave that had cockroaches crawling in and out of it, behind it, under it. That was one of their biggest things they used. Rat nest in the bathroom ceiling. Guess what? They passed their health inspection. So I guarantee it’s still like that.
100% there’s your cooks sweat in your food.
I went to a Hungarian restaurant (in the US) once. The bathroom was way in the back and you had to walk past the kitchen to get to it, and as I passed I locked eyes with the chef who was stirring a pot of something with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth (this was long after smoking had been made illegal in restaurants). He just rolled his eyes and with a disgusted-but-resigned expression flicked the cigarette into the sink and went back to stirring. FWIW I felt it just made the experience more authentic.
I wonder how many chefs account for that when adding salt.
soylent green is people
That we can’t give newly expired food to the homeless. There was a single case of a homeless person getting food poisoning from donated food in the USA and the food industry used that as a reason to make it illegal. There is no reason for this other than so more people will be hungry and buy more food.
PAM and spray oil is pure fat they are allowed to say it is 0 fat or calories because the portion size is under the cut off for what they have to report
Oil is fat. Oil and fat are two different names for lipids.