Stop taking food with your fingers (and other food things)
At work I just had to throw a dish of veggie sausage away because because someone took a Sausage with their fingers. That is not just a waste of good food but customers had to wait while we cooked more. Some stuff customers do in a food environment would put you off. STOP IT. You are wasting food, making more work in an already busy environment, and making fellow customers wait. While we’re at it only use the tongs with the individual dish. Using tongs from some other dish can cause allergies to flair up (particularly peanuts), and again leads to is throwing food away.
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When I moved to Korea in the early 2000s, I noticed their rather tolerant attitude towards dogs in restaurants, and while I disapproved, I figured "When in Rome...", and just shrugged it off.
Got back to Canada in 2022, and saw that it was now the norm, at least in some cafes, over here as well. As a Canadian, I should have the right to scream blue-murder about this shift in cultural norms, but I do wish to go back to some of these places.
And I’ve never encountered dog hair in my coffee either, nor have I encountered poorly behaved dogs in a coffee shop. Poorly behaved humans, and the occasional human hair, on the other hand . . . .
Several local gastropubs are also dog-friendly, but only in certain sections.
I think Basketactortale must have been unlucky in their choice of cafe...
As regards taking food items with the wrong tongs, or even fingers - definite no-nos, and, if I saw that happening, I would leave the establishment immediately.
I've been to various cafes in SW England, Wales and the Midlands recently and I think there have been dogs in every single one. Quite a lot of these are National Trust or English Heritage, but I don't think this changes anything about how offensive and disrespectful it is.
Last week I was in the food court of an indoor market. One of those ones that has recently been done up and has a place to sit and you get food from one of various stalls.
And blow me down if there weren't several dogs with their owners sat at the communal tables. In the centre of town!
The culture has certainly changed in this regard in the last 5 years.
One of my aspirations is to visit a good quality cat cafe one day
At, for example, a reception with canapes / finger food, trays of food circulate and people take individual items with their fingers. People take the item closest to them, and avoid touching other food with their fingers.
It's common enough around here to get a couple of pizzas in for some kind of working lunch type gathering, and whilst there will be some kind of knife or cutter to help liberate pizza slices, people are extracting slices of pizza from the box with their hands.
It is, perhaps, not completely obvious to everyone why your tray of sausages is so different.
As for foods like peanuts/tree nuts that can cause allergies, they should be far enough away from other foods that using tongs from other foods isn’t going to happen. Otherwise, there’s still risk of cross-contamination just from bits of the nuts falling in other foods as it moves from dish to plate.
There are cat cafes in Japan, but I'm not sure they are what you are looking for.
https://asianwanderlust.com/en/cat-cafe-tokyo-japan/
There are a few in the UK, but none that close to me yet.
Canapés should be set out so that that you can pick one up without touching others. What people do in a private situation doesn’t fall under the law. Hot food on a hot counter is different and has different rules. Hot Held food should have a dedicated set of tongs, should be in a separate receptacle. Basically you don’t know where people’s hands have been. You can’t guarantee their hands are clean. There are other reasons. As to nuts and peanuts, yes they should be separate but if I had £1 for every time I had to stop people picking things up after touching nuts I could retire. Even keeping hold of the nut tongs and using them to pick up none nut products because it is easier. Also you could have touched a meat product and then a product a vegetarian/vegan would eat. Again the food has to go. Also if you put something on your plate then decide you don’t want it and put it back that is a no no. If you decide you don’t want it it has to be thrown away.
In other words, the real complaint shouldn’t be about people doing these things. The real complaint should be about people ignoring the signs telling them not to do these things.
I'm confused by the idea that a café being dog-friendly is somehow *offensive* - I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting dogs in a café, it's just a different preference. The branch of Caffe Nero near me (a UK coffee shop chain) has a tub of dog biscuits (like Milkbones, for the Americans) for customers so it's made pretty obvious that dogs are welcome - I don't know if this is the case across the whole chain, but they wouldn't do it if it harmed their business.
My niece has a Dog, a mixture of Staffordshire Terrier and several other breeds (!), but he is a benign* and friendly soul, and has wonderful sticky-up ears. On patronising a certain local gastropub for lunch one day, we were made most welcome, and the staff could not have been more attentive towards us and the Dog (who ate as many titbits as they could find for him...
I'm not particularly fond of Dogs, but my niece's Hugo is an attractive and entertaining character. He has, I may say, been well brought up, but it's Dogs which have not been properly trained that cause a nuisance, more often than not. The offence is then largely due to the human owner of the Dog, rather than the animal itself.
Personally, I'd avoid a Cat cafe - not because I disapprove of Cats, intelligent and sagacious animals that they are, but simply because I'm severely allergic to their fur...to the extent of once being virtually blinded by a stray hair, and ending up in A&E.
(*My brother's word for him - it seems most appropriate)
IME a comparatively large proportion of the dog owners one is likely to encounter in the UK either have difficulty controlling their dogs, or are highly indulgent (this may also be true of owners generally in other countries, but perhaps the crowded nature of cities and towns makes this stand out).
And AFAICT the pandemic has just made this worse, because there are a large number of people with dogs who would not have owned dogs otherwise.
On the whole I don't think people, animals and food should be in the same enclosed space.
I totally get Hugal's point about not touching the food: if tongs are provided, why on earth would you not use them?
PS Hello Pomona - good to see you! 🙂
1. Ensure every member of the public who may be handling food in that situation has received adequate instruction (and, that they understand that and remember it when needed). Given that there are people who seem to think it's acceptable to leave the toilet (touching door handles etc as they leave) without washing their hands, good luck with that.
2. Keep members of public out of those situations, and have all food handling conducted by trained staff who have the relevant qualifications and equipment.
If you put untrained members of the public in situations where they handle food then you need to accept the consequences of that decision. Presumably that decision saves money on paying staff to plate up food, but at the cost of some food needing to be thrown out.
Domestic situations are up to your relationship with your pets, but for public venues like cafes or restaurants I think exclusion is preferable. I'm a bit influenced by the time we were in a country house restaurant which had resident dogs, one of whom had shit under a nearby table. Had it been up to me, I would have left, but we were guests.
Last time I ate at an Arab restaurant, I plucked a cockroach off my pile of rice and kept on eating.
It's the owner's choice. I just don't want their choices about their animals imposed on me in a public eating place. And I can't see why this should even be an issue.
The store that I work in is dog friendly on the sales floor but the public dining areas are assistance dogs only.
However, the thing I really won't tolerate/use is salad bars: cross contamination in the preparation area is bad enough but the chances of pathogens being deposited by patrons are too high to be borne.
One of my pet peeves is the freshly-baked-on-the-premises area for Lidle or Tescos or wherever, where tongs are provided to grab the bun or roll and pop it in the bag. However. The tongs are often too small to grab the item. The only way to use the tongs to secure it would be to stab the thing with them. Which I refuse to do. First world problem.
Now, now: some of them will be the ones that thinking cleaning your arse means you're gay.
Bleedin' idiots come in so many subspecies these days.
Likewise. I suspect the answer is “miniscule”. Furthermore, I’d love to see a comparison of illness rates between the modern, Health and Safety obsessed world and, say, 40 years ago when the sort of thing in the OP just wasn’t an issue.
IMO the problem, as so often with these things, lies in our overly litigious society where if the one in a million chance actually happens and someone gets sick from eating a sausage that someone else has touched first then they can sue the restaurant for loadsamoney, rather than just accepting their bad luck and getting on with it.
I speak as one with a peanut allergy who doesn’t give a stuff about people using their fingers in buffet situations, and has nevertheless somehow managed to survive well into his fifth decade.
In days before supermarkets, I don't think people handled food in the way that they do today. More people worked in shops and you'd be served things rather than getting it for yourself from a shelf.
But there's no guarantee that the people working in those shops had clean hands of course. There has always been something relating cultural habits to cleanliness which rings hollow.
I think things have changed in that many working people were closer to the grime, so to speak. Which meant that they were more likely to be ill than we are today, but also that they probably had a level of immunity to microbial infections.
As far as I can see the reality of this is easily tested. People from the UK commonly get stomach upsets when they eat food in places where there are less environmental health controls than at home.
I'm not sure whether one has numbers specifically about infections caused by unwashed hands touching food in the UK, but it is all about a regime of food and environmental health consciousness. There certainly have been infections from food outlets traced to butchers. It might seem like someone touching a bread roll in Lidl is a long way from a nasty pathogen infection from a butcher, but it is all part of the same safety regime.
And believe you me, we really don't want to go back to the situation where nasty pathogens were passed around with no protections.
Which that report attributes to people shopping less frequently (and thus storing food for longer), inappropriately stored or reheated pre-prepared meals, eating out more often, increased international travel, the emergence of new diseases, globalisation of the food market (i.e. food coming from countries with lower production standards), and increased reporting of food poisoning illnesses. There’s nothing there to suggest that people using their fingers to get food from a buffet or shelf is at all significant, and certainly not to the point that one person doing so justifies throwing away the entire tray.
And yet the locals in those places seem not to be troubled by eating the same food. Strong evidence for the hypothesis that overly sanitising our environment has ironically left us more susceptible to disease by weakening our immune systems through lack of use. Obviously dangerous pathogens like salmonella need to be eradicated at source, but when it comes to the comparatively benign ones it’s probably better in the long term for us to be exposed to them than not.
And I can't blame allergic people for not wanting to die (allergies seem to have really skyrocketed in the past few decades) or really anybody for wanting to avoid vomiting and diarrhea. If you're basically healthy, it's easy to focus on the nuisance of some food safety rules. But for anybody who's medically fragile, well... and that's pretty much everybody at some point in their lives. Old age, pregnancy, and disabilities more or less guarantee it.
Which could explain the antagonism to simple practices like washing hands after using the loo and using utensils provided for handling food - the brain dead who think these practices are OK may be the same brain dead who are unwelcoming to visitors or migrants from other parts of the world.
I think 'untroubled' is doing a lot of work here; Firstly, from experience of living abroad the locals generally have a set of practices around what they will and won't eat, and are often much more diligent about things like washing their hands before meals.
Secondly, the effects of poorer hygiene practices are real in those places, and fall disproportionately on the young:
https://www.who.int/news/item/03-12-2015-who-s-first-ever-global-estimates-of-foodborne-diseases-find-children-under-5-account-for-almost-one-third-of-deaths
[Even ignoring deaths, there are often medium to long term effects in terms of poorer health and developmental outcomes]