Gah! Chicken juice!

[Procrustes]

When my stepdaughter was a teenager she used to make the family dinner now and then. It was always, well, interesting - took her a couple of tries to get the hang of some things but it was always fun and she turned into a great cook. One night she made a tandoori chicken using a tandoori paste mix she found in some international food store. We all sat down and I characteristically started shoveling it down while everyone else was still talking (and watching me out of the corner of one eye). It wasn't that hot temperature wise - actually, it was just warm - but I figured it must have gotten cold sitting on the table or something and besides I was brought up never to criticize the chef. I'm just about done with my first helping when she starts talking about the funny directions on the label... and I suddenly realize that she had never before seen a recipe that used centigrade rather than fahrenheit. Instead of cooking the chicken she'd just incubated it for a while!

I made a joke and it turned out OK. I'd never had chicken sashimi before, but I didn't get sick. My mom used to say "stomach acid will kill anything." Not 100% true, but true enough to be comforting.

[Beirut]

Procrustes,

That's priceless.

Actually, my woman's friend went out to dinner with her family, they all ate chicken and everyone was fine. Except the baby, who barfed the entire following day. The doctor said everyelse got away with the bad chicken, probably, because they were all drinking Coke, except the baby. The doctor said the Coke probably killed off the bacteria. True story.

Dishwasher? We don't need no stinking dishwasher!

I am...

The Dishwasher.

[Hetman_Koronny]

The doctor said the Coke probably killed off the bacteria. True story.

Yeah, that can be true. *turns into recalling mode*

Back in old days, when Poland was still a communist country, there weren't restaurants here, nor McDonalds of course. You could eat either at home or your workplace. In cities there were a few places called...hmmm... the dictionary says: self-service restaurant serving cheap meals

Anyway, you could get a small selection of meals there, mostly tripe, some soup, that popular polish sausage-mushrooms dish (bigos), some pork maybe, etc.
The level of hygiene there...well, actually there wasn't anything like that. Just imagine eating of the same bowls and using the same cutlery that was fastened with a chain to a table be which you could sit an have your meal. The food was prepared in disastrous conditions.

Despite of a potential disease, severe poisoning or ever worse, people would eat there if they had to. Such places were actually pretty popular at train/bus stations. And yes, there was a sure way to avoid any complications at all. There wasn't Coke here at that time but... A small glass of vodka would always do - no bacteria would ever survive

[Somebody Else]

Hurray for vodka!

Cure, and cause, of all of life's ills...

(sorry Homer... stole your line)

[Procrustes]

The vodka/coke thing reminds me of an epi report I read a few years ago about an outbreak of food poisoning after a clam bake. Turns out that people who were drinking beer with their clams were a lot less likely to have gotten sick than those that weren’t. So…. Drink up!

Here’s a little bit of Roman trivia for you. Did you know that the Roman legions drank vinegar instead of water? One of the first things they did when they moved to a new location was build a vinegar still. They felt that vinegar made them hale and hearty. True, actually – it wasn’t full of all the nasty bugs that “fresh” water was likely to have. It shows up in a bible story, too - the Roman soldier who held a vinegar-soaked sponge up to Jesus on the cross was trying to be kind to a dying man.