I just finished eating a gritty Wendy’s baked potato (I ate the skin anyway - I’m not the world’s pickiest eater), and it got me wondering if I should perhaps not be eating gritty potato skins.
The second part of my question is, the folks at fast-food places know people eat the skins and clean them accordingly, right? Or am I just kidding myself and eating dirty potatoes?
Oh my god! Get down to the emergency room immediately!
But seriously, only the eyes are poisonous, and you have to eat fifty kajillion of them to cause yourself harm.
The grittiness would probably be dirt and sand. The baking process probably kills any bacteria, so it’s more an esthetic issue than a health one.
Potato skins . . . mmmmmmmm.
It was gritty as in sandy?
I eat those potatoes every once and in a while and never had any odd feeling when eating the whole thing. I’d assume Wendy’s doesn’t want to get sued so they must wash them.
Thanks for the link, Scott, but I was talking about the dirt on the skins, not the greenness of sunburnt potatoes. No big surprise to me that sunburnt potatoes won’t kill you (or I’d be dead already); they just don’t taste very good. (I have a special fondness for the brown potato chips, though. Yum.)
I would say the grittiness was dirt rather than sand, since it was black. If it matters?
I’d be more concerned with this (note Wendy’s placement):
I couldn’t find any similar information for Canadian fast food restaurants - I’ve sent off an email to the Canadian Food Safety website, and hopefully they will get back to me shortly.
Hey waitaminit:
I saw this report the other weekend (alongside counterfeit Lance Armstrong bands), and McDonald’s was number 1, not Burger King. I can’t remember any other differences.
Funny, our local paper had a report on the cleanest restaurants and cited Jack-in-the-Box as #1 (which we don’t have locally), Taco Bell as #2, and McDonald’s was way down in the list (around #25).
Come on, Wendys selling dirt and sand? This the good ole US of A isn’t it.
:wally
I think that they put something like large grained salt on there potatoes, makes you want to buy more of that high profit margin diet soda. JMHO
You know, I worked at Wendy’s for nearly a year, and I have no idea how the potatoes are prepared before baking (wasn’t my responsibility). They’re wrapped in aluminum foil before being baked, but I’m not sure whether they’re wrapped in the store or shipped to us that way. Either way, I’ve never had dirt or sand in my potato, and I always eat the skin.
Be glad it was just grit:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/the_valley/11212811.htm
… or maybe it was bone meal …
I was under the impression that in most fast food resturants nowadays, the soda had free refills. So it’s not like they’re making any money if you drink more of it.
Mine are usually gritty, I like to tell myself it’s Cajun style. 
Yabob got there before me, but here is a non-sign-up link
Wendy’s special
Yeah, thanks. I figured out that it didn’t work after I posted (it DOES if you link from the google results - I don’t subscribe to the Murky News either). When I posted, there weren’t all that many links, but it was being picked up so rapidly, I figured they’d be all over the place today.
They “then had some kind of emotional reaction and vomited”?!? :eek:
Yeah, I think I’d have some kind of emotional reaction, too - ie shrieking hysterically and jumping up and flailing about, etc., followed by extended bouts of disinfecting my mouth and calling for a therapy appointment.
Okay, really puts a little dirt on my potato in perspective.
Very generally speaking, from a microbiological standpoint, fast food places are just about the safest places to eat there are. Think about it - they feed millions of people every day, and even one screw-up will cause massive bad publicity. Jack-in-the-Box, anyone? So their food supply lines are designed to be very safe and really idiot-proof, so it is generally hard for a lazy employee in the store to make a lot of people sick.
I worked at a Wendy’s for 5 years through high school and college summers. Potatoes could be ordered pre-wrapped, or they could be ordered unwrapped in large boxes and then you would order precut sheets of aluminum foil separately. Our Wendy’s always opted for the second option, as it was cheaper as far as materials/supplies went and the labor was nearly free as wrapping potatoes was more of a down time activity. As far as preparation, the potatoes were placed onto a bread tray (that is, a large plastic tray probably 3ft x 4ft with holes in the bottom - think a flatter, larger milk crate) - we would then rinse them, turn them a couple of times and rinse each time ,then we individually wrapped them in foil, shiny side out. They didn’t come to us particularly dirty, but we didn’t scrub them or anything so any dirt that didn’t just wash off would probably be there. I’d imagine contamination would be pretty unlikely though - potatoes had one of the longest cooking times in the store- something like 60 minutes at 450. Bout the only thing we cooked longer was the chili (which simmers for a least two hours, and thats after cooking and recooking the beef). Once wrapped nobody handled the potatoes unwrapped except right before you ate them - they were stored in the warming trays in the original foil.