Spit

People would be amazed/shocked/traumatized if they knew what goes on behind the scenes at eateries.

Character Farva in the movie "Super Troopers" pulling apart his hamburger after it was spat upon by an employee. In the movie, he concludes what happened, and goes ahead and eats it.

(CALGARY, Alberta) - Clark County Sheriff's Deputy Edward Bylsma went into a Burger King in Vancouver, WA early one morning in March 2009. He ordered a hamburger and, after getting it, had an uneasy feeling about a couple of the workers. He checked the burger and found a gob of spit. A DNA check revealed that it came from one of the workers.

On April 13, 2010, Bylsma filed a suit in federal court suit in Portland seeking at least $75,000 in damages, naming Burger King Corp. and franchise operator Kaizen Restaurants in Beaverton.

This makes me wonder how often this kind of thing actually happens. I suspect it is rare and individuals who do such a thing are clearly unbalanced. In this case I would suspect (and this is just my opinion) that the act was motivated by dislike or hatred of police, or maybe this particular cop.

And yet, people would be amazed/shocked/traumatized if they knew what goes on behind the scenes at eateries. Staying on the topic of spit, I recall a scene in the Robert De Niro movie Casino where Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) owns a restaurant and a couple of the gangsters are putting together a couple of sandwiches. One of them hawks a good one and spits into the open sandwich, closes it, and wraps it. In the next scene he is handing it over to a cop with much friendliness and bon homie. It’s not clear whether the cops are getting “freebies” or just being insulted.

Peter C. Newman in his first volume of The Canadian Establishment (1975) has a chapter on the exclusive clubs of the country. Newman writes: “During the fifties there was a retired railway steward called Richards who served senior members of the Toronto Club. He complained about the abusive treatment meted out to him by Sir James Dunn, but he found an appropriate solution. Whenever he served him soup, he spat into it first.”

George Orwell’s first book was Down and Out in Paris and London, (1933). His experiences working in hotels and restaurants in Paris are worth reading. A couple of excerpts.

“It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup—that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness.”

One last comment about spit. In one of his monologues, George Carlin announced that saliva causes stomach cancer—but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time.

Here’s a little exercise to try, or not try. Sluice around a lot of saliva in your mouth, then dribble it into a clean, clear, glass. Let it sit for a couple of minutes, then pick it up and drink it ! Can you do it? Not everyone can. Some people feel squeamish just at the thought.

Enough about spit

In the Robin Williams movie Birdcage he is rushing around and quickly opens the double doors into the kitchen. The scene lasts only two or three seconds, but there is a cook picking up a piece of meat from the floor and putting it back on a plate. I laughed out loud the first time I saw that scene. In Orwell’s Paris:

“There was a rule that employees must pay for anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and sent it up again.”

He goes on:

“A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten—I must make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead onto the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff's and the patron’s…. Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered—a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.”

“In spite of all this the Hotel X was one of the dozen most expensive hotels in Paris, and the customers paid startling prices….I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English—no French—and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food..”

We now live in a society that is paranoid about cleanliness. There are hand sanitizers in almost every public place you enter (at least in Calgary). I go to Safeway and there are handiwipes so you can wipe off the handle of the shopping cart. At the public library there are plunger bottles of anti-bacterial cleanser so you can get rid of germs you’ve picked up from anything you’ve touched.

It’s getting to the point where it’s as if we are channelling the late Howard Hughes.