Originally Posted by ILuvParis

One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of breakfast restaurants in Europe and the U.K. seem to serve canned juice (I've tried to avoid Hi-C since I was a kid and that's what it reminds me of).

So, I was thrilled last week when I went into a restaurant in London and noticed that they had fresh squeezed juice. I was sitting across from this machine into which oranges are dropped, one at a time, into a clear tank (for lack of a better word) so one can observe the process. The orange is sliced in two and then each half is squeezed into the area below and the rest of the orange is discarded into some unseen bin. There were several boxes of oranges stacked up from Brazil and South Africa, according to the printing on the boxes. Periodically, one of the employees would place several oranges onto the top of this contraption to keep the process moving. I began to wonder if this was sanitary - the whole juicing process is in the same clear tank as where the juice is held. I suppose the oranges could have been washed before they were boxed, however, at one point the guy feeding the machine dropped an orange on the floor and put it right back onto the machine to be dropped in with the fresh juice. That, I know, was not sanitary.

Now, are Americans just crazy with their food sanitation or would there be some public health violations in London that were probably not being followed? If I would have been in the U.S., I would have reported what I saw to the manager, but I just watched and ordered a can of Diet Coke to drink with my omelet.