No, it’s no deal for the spittee. No dishonor, no foul, no harm or effect at all.
All that baggage hang’s on the spitter. On top of being an impotent fool.
Some of my co-workers say the eater has been fouled in some way. I say no, he/she hasn’t. The spit is merely a metaphor for an insult, and an insult not perceived by the target is as empty as the goon who throw’s it.
Of course if you come to know of the spit, then everything changes, and is no longer part of this discussion.
HEre’s the thing:
If I don’t know about it-how can I have any opinion on it?
The idea, however, even if I don’t know about it, sickens me, that someone would be that crass. Not so much for eating someone’s spit-hell, we kiss other people, and stick our mouths on each other’s genitalia if we love someone, so it’s not that.
No, it’s the nastiness, the pettiness and the utter perversity behind the act.
When a friend of mine used to work at Wendy’s as a kid, a co-worker urinated into the pickles. This was many years ago and while my friend isn’t happy to have this knowledge, the fact is, nothing ever came of it. Personally, I think the guy should have faced criminal charges but it didn’t pan out that way.
I would imagine that there are many things that we all have ingested that would make us quite sick to our stomachs if we knew. Hell, look at the list sometime that shows the allowable number of items that the FDA allows into food items because you can’t really keep them totally out. There is a certain number of grasshoppers allowed in a box of fig newtons and an allowable amount of maggots allowable in an 8 oz. serving of orange juice for example.
I would rather not know these things occur but so far no damage done that I’m aware of.
Anyway, just some food for thought. Bon Apetit everyone 
Whenever I start to get queasy thinking about what might be in the food I’m eating, I console myself with the fact that human stomach acids are (reportedly) strong enough to etch steel.
Spit’s nothing compared to something like that. 
I’m kind of amazed that the workers have the freedom to do anything like that. The restaurant I work at, something deliberately done like that would be noticed immediately, and the person responsible fired. I’ll admit there are one or two coworkers with questionable hygiene habits, but that’s more a personal issue than anything else (the dishwasher may not seem to use deodorant, but from what I can figure, he does a good job in all other regards).
Thanks, Daniel, that’s reassuring. Words from the horses mouth, as it were. :). Like I said above, I doubt very much that intentionally contaminating patrons food is the norm.
For one thing, most people simply wouldn’t do such a thing. Besides, most restaurants have more than one employee and the perp would likely be observed.
Peace,
mangeorge
I also work in a restaurant. I work in a fine dining restaurant, and I am a line cook. Like all other things in life, you get what you paid for. In all my years working in a fine dining restaurants, I have never seen anyone spit in food, have never seen someone drop something and pick it up and serve it. First of all, cooks are proud of what they cook. I mean, when anyone makes a meal worthy of talking about at home, they are very proud, and i am proud of 90 percent of everthing i make. The other 10 percent are things that are not as visually appealing as they should be or the shallot sauce is not as tight as i would like because of humidity(the shallot sauce happened today). But anyway getting back to my point. I have worked at fast food when i was young, worked at part time night jobs at chain restaurants and preped for hotel banquets for extra cash. I would never eat at any of these places. I never eat fast food and rarely if ever eat at a chain restaurant. Because most of the people who work at these places are paid next to nothing and could care less about how their food turns out. I have a chef that i have to make proud of my employment and he has an manager to appease and on up to the owner. If the restaurant does not have an in kitchen owner or a chef, I wont eat there. Because you get what you paid for.
Welcome to the boards, cptzapi.
Did you know it’s customary to comp a nice meal to the first to welcome a newbie to ths SDMB?
And thank you for the further reassurance.
Peace,
mangeorge
I worked at a Burger King in high school, about 35 years ago. One of the new hires saw a customer he didn’t like (because he was black) and took the guy’s order in back so he could spit on it. The boss saw him and took the evidence and called the cops. It is against the law to adulterate food. The guy was prosecuted and convicted.
But one of the issues is whether it makes any difference if the victim is unaware of what the perp did. I am deaf. If someone shoots at me from behind, and misses, and I don’t know what happened, did no crime occur? I think it did. The shooter shouldn’t be free to keep practicing shooting until he was successful in hurting me.
Regarding the spitter: I’m not sure what goes on in the mind of a person who does that. Partly, I think the spitter is a coward and a weakling, and this is something that can be done with little risk in getting caught and punished.
From what I remember in reading about profiling, it would seem likely that an instance like this is not isolated and is probably part of a long series of mean, sneaky, vengeful acts. These acts, if gone unpunished, will probably increase in visciousness over time, and that is where the most harm can come. Criminals start out with small crimes and work their way up.
What I wrote isn’t very clear and should read “…saw a customer he didn’t like (because the customer was black)…”
Just want to say that I worked in food service for several years in college and never saw anyone deliberately adulterating food.
The worst things I ever saw was a coupla guys who had sandwiches to take to the front for the waitresses to pick up. Being rather lazy guys, instead of picking up the tray on which he’s assembled said sammich, Guy A picks up the sammich, passes the sandwich to guy B, who attempt to pass it to me. I’m like, guys, I know you washed your hands, but everyone back here doesn’t need to touch the sammich, okay?.
And occasionally I’d have to send back a tray or plate because it hadn’t been washed until it was actually clean. I’d worry more about dirty cutlery at the smaller places (no automatic dishwashers, just a guy with a bad attitude and a sink) than someone spitting in the food.
But there ya go. A kajillion lunch shifts in which I was the short order cook in which no food was picked up offa the floor, no one was spitting in the food, and we generally tried to make the stuff look appetizing rather than just schlopping it ona plate.
I’m still a mean short order cook if I do say so myself.
And yeah, mangeorge, no-one can ever discuss this topic w/o trotting out some horror story. I’ve had dogs lick in my mouth (not on purpose of course), I’ve swallowed a bug, I’m sure I’ve eaten more than my yearly pound of dirt in my life (heck as a baby I’m told I was caught eating it with a spoon…)
I say if I don’t know and it’s doesn’t harming me, my life has not been impinged in any way.
I’m not so sure; suppose I steal something from someone, but it happens to be something that they didn’t know they owned (like some money in the mail); have they been wronged?
Where’s Homer Simpson when you need him. He could explain this much better than I can.
Hell, if Homer saw the waiter spit in his food, he’d go ahead and eat it. Then he’d go and smash the guy’s face.
Money is yours as soon as it’s intended for you. An insult is different, it’s not an insult until you’re aware you’ve been insulted.
From m-w;
We’re dealing with #1
And, also from m-w;
All for you, Mangetout
Peace,
mangeorge
Ah, well since you have a dictionary, how can I be right?
But OK, we’ll drop the stealing analogy and go for something a bit closer; if I’m cooking for a Jew and I deliberately include pork products into the food that they will eat, are they only insulted/wronged if they know about it?
It would bother me more to find out that someone had spit in my food than to find out that my candy bar had contained .0002 oz of insect parts accidentally ground up in the process of making it. The problem I’d have with someone spitting in my food is that it’s both malicious and underhanded. If I ticked off a waiter, I’d rather it be obvious through his manner that he thought I was a
%&@ than to smile to my face and do that.
How many more people can say it? We can’t be insulted or wronged if we are not aware of the fact. Thus, anything which doesn’t cause any real harm cannot be accounted for, and might as well have never happened.
As far as the spitters go, I’ve known two people in my food service history to have done it, each had done it once on independent occaissions, and not to random customers.
More often we threatened and insinuated instead. You take a lot of shit from people when you work in fast food. There is no sense in paying McD workers more; I higly doubt their pay scale is what causes the turnover rates. As was said above, never mess with people that prepare your food; we used to make this rather vocal to all the clowns that came through drive thru. At my place, AFAIK, we never actually carried through with it, and we didn’t need to, because the greatest part was it was the opposite of “spit and don’t tell”; “tell and don’t spit” gave them all the nervousness they could handle but never involved us causing any potential harm. It really was a glorious set-up.
I imagine Herpes and Hepatitis can be passed easily through saliva, and those aren’t exactly uncommon diseases (as far as diseases go). They also aren’t particularly nice, especially the latter (as I hope we are all aware).
In summary, if the premise is “there is no harm done” then I must agree, there is no harm done. But the practice is a big deal even if there is no harm done for reasons people have given already and aren’t worth repeating.
Or “highly”, even. but “higly” does have a certain emphatic nature that “highly” simply lacks, even in italics.
Actually, you’re right; no real, tangible harm is done (unless the cook has been eating peanut butter and the victim has an allergy, or something like that); my objections were all based on my failure to narrowly isolate the issue of physical harm from the raft of other issues involved in the idea.
Mangeorge, I believe this is why the phrase is “blissfully ignorant”. Maybe you’re better off by not knowing, but you’re avoiding the truth of the situation by doing so.