A Reuters Oddly Enough news item (N.B. I don’t know how long the link will be valid)
A customer in a restaurant in Arvika, Sweden noticed that all the seats were missing from the toilets. He asks the staff about the missing seats and sees an employee pull them out of the dishwasher where they had been cleaned along with the forks and knives.
This was an “international hamburger chain” (do I smell McDonald’s). I shudder to think which ingredients they included in their “special sauce”. :eek:
Blech.
I am SO glad I quit eating fast food!
But I am going to go hurl my lunch now, thanks!
Oh, no.
Say it ain’t so!!!
Urp.
Oh, please. I just finished restraining my nausea in the Michael Jackson thread, only to open this one and have the bile rise again. Eeeuuuuwwww!
Does McDonald’s use forks and knives in Sweden? I thought they were dispoable everything everywhere.
Now, I must get back to eating my bagel… Though my apetite just isn’t the same.
Not to pee on the parade of gross-outs, but any revulsion y’all might feel has an irrational basis.
Industrial dishwashers operate at temperatures that sterilize whatever you put in there.
So after this operation, the dishes are totally sterile, and the toilet seats are totally sterile. A considerable step up from most fast food places I’ve observed.
I’d be more worried about the food that comes into contact with the dishes afterwards. Ick.
Charmian: might not have been a McDonald’s. The article actually uses the term “kitchen utensils.”
Larry Mudd: are you saying that those toilet seats were clean enough to eat off of?
Call me a cynic, but I’d tend to believe that in the average fast food restaraunt, the bathrooms are probably cleaner than the kitchen.
Arnold, that’s probably precisely what Larry was saying, that the toliet seats WERE clean enough to eat off of.
I hate to say this, but the septic junk that’s left on most food plates after an hour or so sitting around a warm and moist kitchen is most likely WAY worse than what’s on the average toilet seat. Once all of it goes through one of those dishwashers, they’re probably all clean enough to pass muster as food plates.
All this fear of toilet seats. By now I would have thought smart people would be over it…
Yeah, TVGuy, but it can still gross you out, even if you’re smart enough to understand. It’s like when you take your kids to McDonald’s on Halloween, and they won’t eat the burgers, because they’ve been prepared by a goblin (or a guy in a goblin mask). It looks like toilet seats are some adults’ goblins. Isn’t that cute? 
It all seems kind of fishy to me. You’d think it would be easier to clean the toilet seats on the toilet rather than going through al the trouble of removing them and putting them back on.
And yet, I will eat a cupcake that’s been sitting on a plate in a kitchen for an hour, yet I won’t eat a cupcake that someone fished from off a toilet seat.[sup]1[/sup] 
And I thought all my phobias were rational!
[sup]1[/sup]If someone wants to make this an IMHO poll, go right ahead!
The story screams “urban legend.” Note that the article has no specifics at all. No names are mentioned. What chain? What was the name of the customer? Actual news stories don’t leave out this information.
Didn’t I see this on the Simpsons once?
RealityChuck, doesn’t Reuters have a good reputation for accuracy? I always assume their “Oddly Enough” news items are true.
Um, no. And it takes about four hours of being left out in temperatures between 41 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit before food comes to the point where you don’t want to eat it. And considering that there are a lot of people with lousy aim in the bathroom who don’t properly clean after themselves, I am not taking my chances on eating on the average toilet just to see if you’re right. My sanitation class claims otherwise.