I DIDN’T ORDER THAT...

MANY of us will have flicked through a sticky restaurant menu, wondering when it was last cleaned.

The truth is they aren’t cleaned very often and can harbour potentially dangerous bacteria as they’re shared constantly between staff and customers — and gather germs from food too, according to US microbiologists, Paul Dawson and Brian Sheldon. They took swabs from 18 different menus and detected thousands of bacteria on them — the busier the restaurant, the more bacteria there were. Bacteria were also easily transferred from contaminated hands to the menus. What’s more, laminated menus harboured bacteria — including Staphylococcus, E. coli and listeria — for longer, as the bacteria survived and transferred better on plastic than paper.