Time to come
Too often we only wash our hands of responsibility, says Jane Bradley
Onawarmday,witha couple of hours of stuffy train travel ahead of me, a tantalising picture of a gleaming iced coffee on an advertising hoarding lured me in. Automatically, I headed to one of the numerous coffee chains at Edinburgh’s Waverley station and placed my order. It was only when the barista started to whizz up the ice machine that I remembered why I felt a slight sense of foreboding. The faecal bacteria.
A BBC investigation last month found that samples of ice found in drinks at a sample of coffee shops belonging to the Costa, Starbucks and Caffe Nero chains contained faecal bacteria. That is “bits of poo” to you and me.
A follow-up inquiry earlier this week found a similar problem in all branches of KFC, Mcdonalds and Burger King visited by BBC testers for the broadcaster’s Watchdog programme. A similar investigation was carried out by the broadcaster a year ago – with similar results.
While absolutely revolting and enough to make you switch your iced frappucino moccuccino for a boiling hot-nuke-’em-til-they’redead espresso forever, it is not actually surprising at all.
Most people do not wash their hands properly when they go to the toilet. It is cool to not care about germs. Why would people who work in coffee shops be any different to the rest of the population?
The chains involved have expressed their shock and promised that they will undergo a deep clean of the ice machines and ensure their staff are trained in food preparation hygiene. For yes, the big companies, the food hygiene inspectors and authorities such as hospitals, schools etc, have policies in place in an effort to prevent this from happening.
It is just that, bar conducting a hand wash check on the exit from the loos – as the dinner ladies used to do at my primary school every day before we ate lunch – it is impossible to implement unless staff show common sense.
How this type of bacteria is spread is simple. Someone goes to the toilet, then they do not wash their hands. They go back to their work as a barista, picking up ice cubes with their bare hands and immediately contaminate your drink. If they have the remnants of a gastro infection – norovirus, rotavirus and the like – you might well become ill after drinking that coffee.
While the investigation also said it was possible that the ice supply, or ice handling equipment, could be the course of the problem, it was most likely that poor hygiene was responsible.
Management can tell workers that they have to follow hygiene rules until they are blue in the face, it will make no difference. Put the fear of god into this lot of staff and next week, there will be a new worker who cannot be bothered to wash his hands, or doesn’t want to miss a day’s work after he has recovered from being ill.
When I lived in Eastern Europe many moons ago, I was faced with a number of what – to me as a westerner at least – seemed to be insane old wives’ tales relating to health.
If you sat between two open windows, you would be subject to the “curant” – a draught which, all by itself, could cause sore throats, headaches, earaches and much worse. If a woman was spotted sitting on a cold, concrete step outside, even in summer, or walked barefoot on a non-carpeted floor inside, someone, often a stranger, would leap up and warn her that she was at risk of “freezing” her ovaries, causing all kinds of fertility problems.
This, of course, all sounds ridicu-