Originally Posted by
janetdoe
I must disagree with you. If a person is careful to touch only the piece of food they are consuming, I think that using your hands is far more sanitary than everyone touching the same pair of germ-infested tongs.
That "If" is so big you could shove a couple of germ-infected hands through it.
Your point seems to be that your hands and your co-ordination should be good enough for me.
I would never use my hands to 'scoop' anything up, where I might contact other food. But I find it much easier and more practical to pick up a croissant or pastry with my fingers rather than attempting to crush it between the typical too-small pair of tongs provided at a buffet in order to transfer it to my plate.
Yet this particular individual was picking up nuts and potato chips, for example. Perhaps she's a surgeon, a concert pianist, or otherwise gifted with near-miraculous hand co-ordination. How otherwise could one pick up peanuts out of a bowl without leaving a few little germs behind?
If you were really concerned about the cleanliness of the food, the correct thing to do would be to summon a manager and tell them what you saw and how you feel it contaminated the food and ask them to remove or replace it. Alternatively, explain to the woman how she was contaminating the food. What good does glaring malevolently at the woman do?
Thanks for your attempt to provide instructions in appropriate behavior; however, I don't generally go through life creating confrontations for the sake of, well, providing instructions in appropriate behavior, other than more serious circumstances. If, for example, there was a flu pandemic, I would have quietly spoken to a manager.
As you may know, it's standard procedure on cruise ships for the buffet to be manned by employees and off limits to customers when there's an outbreak of something nasty aboard.
On a more practical level, the lounge would have had to remove everything that was out, because this woman picked her way through every dish.
You infer I was glaring "malevolently." Methinks, given your own insouciant approach to grazing at buffets, that you've been the innocent victim of such malevolence.
Your attitude seems certainly more typical of this era than mine, and I may well be in the minority.