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The cat that lives here is trained to not even GO in the kitchen. Pretty much stays within the carpeted area, unless he's going into her room and has to cross the foyer.
OP, do you buy lettuce from the grocery store? Any other ingredients? Do you ever watch the news? You do realize that unless you grow your own ingredients, all of them, you very likely have eaten things as bad as or worse than the things you're suspecting might have happened in someone else's kitchen, prepared by you right in your own no doubt spotless kitchen, don't you? Or do you somehow think that going through your kitchen automatically sterilizes the ingredients before you cook and eat them?
Some of you are missing the point. I said this elsewhere and I think it applies:
it isn't simply about health concerns, but the idea of it that is simply disgusting. If I picked my nose into your food it wouldn't cause you any health issues either, but that wouldn't make it any less gross.
Of course it's an imperfect plan of attack and you can't stop every germ or whatever. But you do what you can. I think that's the OP's point.
I think one should do what is possible and try not to eat food that is made under poor hygiene standards. For example (my choice only, nobody has to agree with me!) I avoid potluck lunches, or at least the dishes that were made by, huh, people who I know have poor standards regarding cleanliness.
I know my hygiene standards are pretty high at home, but when eating out, even in fine restaurants, it is impossible to know everything the cook/chef do. Also, there are situations where one simply cannot avoid the food, or at least trying it.
Unless you grow your own food it is pretty much impossible that every product one is consuming will be germ-free.
A friend of mine once told me about her sister in law, who was such a fanatic about keeping everything wiped spotless. My friend says once she walked over to the kitchen counter top, and touched it with her finger. Sure enough, within 30 seconds, her hostess picked up a cloth and wiped off the fingerprint.
That is not "concern for healthy living". That is a pathology. That is a women who wakes up in the middle of the night, and can't go back to sleep until she goes downstairs to wipe off the kitchen counters.
I knew a woman in Switzerland who, when needing to adjust the seasoning while cooking, would lift out a little soup with the stirring spoon, and dribble some into a clean spoon just taken out of the drawer, and taste it, and then put that spoon in the dishwasher. Next time she needed to taste, she would do it again with another new spoon. She wouldn't even eat after herself.
That's variable around Europe, but in general, Europeans are very fussy about things like. At the dinner table, nothing that touches your mouth ever goes back down to the table. The fork tines never touch your mouth. You break off a piece of bread that will fit in your mouth, not bite it off.
I would try a little bit of anything that I thought looked good... unless the person who made it was really slovenly.
If any of us knew what the restaurant kitchens, or other places from which our food comes, looked like, nobody would eat anything. We all probably can tolerate quite a few rodent hairs, bug larva, and fecal matter, and we probably do, every day.
No, I do not. Some people are just no a-ok in the hygiene department.
No, don't give me all this crap about "But, but, in restaurants..." "But, but, in stuff you buy at the market and FDA standards". I know all about that stuff, but still, there are some people that I know who aren't clean and I would never eat their food! They either don't wash their hands properly. Or their kitchen is a nasty mess ( and how can your food be clean if the place you cook it in isn't?) Or, they let cold foods become warm and warm foods to stay out too long. I have seen lots of it. And the sad part is, that they are the main ones always trying to cook for others.
A friend of mine once told me about her sister in law, who was such a fanatic about keeping everything wiped spotless. My friend says once she walked over to the kitchen counter top, and touched it with her finger. Sure enough, within 30 seconds, her hostess picked up a cloth and wiped off the fingerprint.
That is not "concern for healthy living". That is a pathology. That is a women who wakes up in the middle of the night, and can't go back to sleep until she goes downstairs to wipe off the kitchen counters.
I knew a woman in Switzerland who, when needing to adjust the seasoning while cooking, would lift out a little soup with the stirring spoon, and dribble some into a clean spoon just taken out of the drawer, and taste it, and then put that spoon in the dishwasher. Next time she needed to taste, she would do it again with another new spoon. She wouldn't even eat after herself.
That's variable around Europe, but in general, Europeans are very fussy about things like. At the dinner table, nothing that touches your mouth ever goes back down to the table. The fork tines never touch your mouth. You break off a piece of bread that will fit in your mouth, not bite it off.
I must be part European then. I (and my immediate female relatives) are like this. I would never taste something with a spoon and keep it around to taste it again later on.
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Also, there are situations where one simply cannot avoid the food, or at least trying it.
