I hear too many horror stories from people who worked in the food service industry for me not to be suspicious. Is there anyway for me to know for sure?
You would be looking at some pretty sophisticated lab techniques to detect many of the more gross ones. Your food would get cold long before they are complete. This is complicated by the fact that many of our foods contain the animal version of something we would consider barfworthy if it came from a human: a bloody steak, a fried egg etc.
Pick your restaurants carefully. It may be easy for a kitchen worker to spit in your food unnoticed but other acts would probably disrupt the flow of preparation process. Likewise, try to find out where you stand with relatives before agreeing to Thanksging dinner.
I wouldn’t sweat it. As Leontes said in The Winter’s Tale
“There may be in the cup
A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected: but if one present
The abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts.”
On the other hand, if you worry about this overmuch, (“As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye”, Pope) you’ll never enjoy another meal again!
Eh, if you’re a meat-eater there’s already body fluids in your food, in a way, you know? I just go to decent restaraunts and don’t sweat the small stuff.
And, if you knowingly stiff your waiter because you’re a cheap dick…don’t go back to that restaurant.
You can know for sure simply by adding body fluids to any food that you eat.
Cool! I was gonna say: “out of sight out of mind.” but I like yours a lot better.
Taste. If someone peed in your cornflakes you’d probably notice.
Perhaps it’s not kosher to offer up an uncited opinion in GQ, but I’ll do so nevertheless: this kind of thing is unbelievably rare in real-life, to my experience (4 1/2 years on the front lines of the restaurant business).
Lots of folks pass on friend-of-a-friend stories, and “I saw it with my own two eyes!” anecdotes. It makes a good story, and it’s fun to talk as though you have “the dirt” on something.
If someone has added his own saliva to your food, the enzymes in the saliva would have begun to turn starches in the food into sugars, exactly in the way that saltines held in your mouth will begin to taste sweet. So, if you have an especially attuned sense of taste, maybe you could tell. Maybe.
As for other bodily fluids, I keep recalling scenes in Barbara Broadcast, so I’ll leave that alone.
But, what does pee taste like?
I don’t know but I’ll bet it doesn’t taste like cornflakes.
Beefeater?