Salad Bar Atrocities
When I asked a friend to meet for lunch recently and suggested the Whole Foods Salad Bar (our local one offers several raw, chopped leave options, plain shredded organic chicken, fresh fruit and steamed veg), she grimaced and said she ‘doesn’t do salad bars’.
I asked why, assuming she’d say it was because, even though it’s Whole Foods, there are still many options that are far from healthy, let alone Paleo. (Organic chicken salad with heaps of mayo and gorgonzola, or stir fry tempura beef in soy sauce leave a lot to be desired!)
Boy, was I wrong. She didn’t want to go because she doesn’t go to any salad bar, ever. Upon further investigation she revealed why: she’d seen an elderly woman going around to the different trays in a salad bar, not at a Whole Foods, but that’s a moot point here, and with the same fork, taking bites of all the offerings.
It was enough to make my friend’s stomach turn. Mine, too.
If you’re curious about sampling a dish in a salad bar, it’s so simple to ask a store employee to serve you a sample, in your own little cup with your own little fork!
Since the conversation with my friend, I, too unfortunately observed something equally as distressing; a man who wanted to serve himself only part of a chicken breast from the tray of rosemary-roasted chicken, took it upon himself to hold the breast with his bare hand, use the tong to rip off half, and then put the other half, that he’d handled back in the tray.
I told on him.
The entire tray of chicken had to be disposed of; what a waste of food, and of those chicken’s lives! One thing I’m very adamant of is not wasting.
Will I still eat at the salad bar, though?
Absolutely.
Yes, those two examples are disgusting, but really, we’re not in a bubble and if we don’t believe that for the most part, it’s more likely than not that our food is not being mishandled, it could be the start of the path to a place where one is afraid to ever eat anything that they didn’t grow themselves.
Ask a lot of questions, choose places to eat that are clean, have a staff that seem tidy in their own appearance and rest assured that the chances your food has been mishandled is less likely than the thought it’s been properly treated. I do!
