I was at the restaurant bar last night with my wife and we got talking to the bartender who was kind of new in the neighborhood about local eating and drinking establishments. He recounted a story about one of our favorite places in the neighborhood and how he found a hair in his burger, and how his girlfriend told him to send it back, but he just cut the burger and ate the rest of it, which he admitted as being really gross.
But why do so many people find a hair gross? I’ve never understood that. I mean, sure, a curly hair I might be a little squicked out by, but just a regular hair? With the amount of handling of your food that goes on, why is hair supposed to be particularly disgusting? There’s practically zero surface area to it. Obviously, it’s never bothered me. I just pull it out and keep on eating. I mean, the places I go to, they don’t wear gloves to make your hamburgers or anything, but their dirty mitts are all over the burger as they construct it. Why don’t people find that particularly gross, if they find hair gross.
I don’t mean this to sound like a “why do humans do things humans do” type of post. It’s just something I don’t particularly understand. Are they are greater disease vector or something that I’m not considering?
Pretty much anything that doesn’t belong in food is disturbing, and hair is the most common offender. (I’m having trouble coming up with a top five… Hair, Bugs, Pebbles, Twigs?)
A long hair “stuck” in your mouth can be a gross sensation, and pulling something 5” long out of your body has a high Ick! potential. A small hair — eyelash size — might well be a rodent hair, which allows the possibility of rat shit or a decayed rat body.
And many people just have issues with food, which might be a good evolutionary characteristic. Any discussion here features posters grossed out by textures and multiple other, seemingly minor, things.
Because the sensation of pulling a long strand of something out of your mouth is one of the most nauseating things I can think of. I’d much rather find a bug than a hair.
Exactly. It’s not finding the hair per se, but what it represents. My stomach is roiling as I think about pulling a hair from my mouth. I can’t even stand it with my own hair.
Hair doesn’t really bother me. I mean, think about all the drops of snot falling out of the noses of the kitchen prep crew who happen to have colds. Bending right over the food all night, drip drip drip.
Pretty much this. I’ve had someone tell me earnestly that my thrifted vintage china was gross because strangers had had used it (like, once a year at Christmas!), then immediately put a restaurant fork in their mouth.
This is why I don’t like corn. Those tassel hairs give me the gross outs. Ick!
When I cook, I am careful and clean (handwashing, hair out of the way).
But I don’t expect restaurants to be so diligent about it. So you just have to go on faith, I guess.
Most of the hairs I find in food fell out of my own eyebrows. I know I certainly can’t stop those from falling out all over the place, so why should I fault the cook if the same thing happens to him or her?
Like I said, I could maybe understand a “curly hair.” I guess it’s just that I think, well, there’s probably somebody’s dead skin cells here, maybe some dandruff, possibly some saliva if the cook is double dipping his tasting spoons, etc., so a hair just seems so benign to me. That said, if I found a fingernail, I guess I would be a little grossed out by that. But not hair, for some reason.
I remember a woman at a party saying that if a dog licked one of her plates, she’d throw the plate away.
Are kids today still concerned with “cooties”? I remember frequent talk of cooties when I was growing up in the 1960s. I’ve since learned that many, many things in the adult world operate on the same principle as cooties, though that specific word isn’t used.
Back when I had long hair, on rare occasion I’d somehow swallow one that was still attached to my head (like 2 or 3 times ever). It is gag-provoking to pull it back up your throat.
But I’m not persnickety about a hair in my own home-cooked food - I know where it came from. In restaurant food, it’s more foreign, and I don’t know what else might have ended up in there. That said, I don’t tend to examine my food, and have never noticed any.
Not only pulling hair out of your mouth is gross but it’s also annoying when you know that there’s a hair in there, somewhere, but for the life of you you cannot get the fucking thing out no matter how much you fish your dirty fingers all over your tongue and insides of your mouth and still can’t locate it, until it finally decides, itself, to make itself presentable for you to extricate.
I guess I should be more on the lookout for hairs in my meals.
An earwig in a package of Danish pies didn’t look too appetizing.
