10 fast-food workers spill the beans: ‘I would NEVER order this!’

A tasty portion of fries, a hamburger, a milkshake – you don’t think twice about ordering those, do you? But people who have worked in fast-food restaurants know exactly what they would never, ever order. ‘The chicken burgers fell on the floor, and the boss said: it doesn’t matter, the bacteria will die in the fryer.’

On the American forum Reddit, fast-food workers anonymously vent about what a mess the kitchen can sometimes be. Everything revolves around fast, faster, fastest, and of course money has to be made.

‘Don’t order this!’

Food hygiene certainly isn’t their highest priority, they say. What horror stories!

A nice cup of tea

‘ I cut my hand while filling the large tea urn. My blood ended up in the tea water. The manager told me we could just use the tea water. He also didn’t think it was right for me to go wash my hands. I threw the tea away anyway and lied that I had a blood disorder so they would at least listen to me.’

Soft serve? No thanks

We previously wrote about why we never want to order soft serve again, and this story proves it once more. ‘I was a shift manager at a fast-food restaurant. And ever since, I haven’t eaten soft serve. That machine was always completely covered in mold, inside and out. The manager cleaned it by scooping the mold off the ice-cream mixture and spraying a little cleaning spray on the outside.’ Disgusting!

A slightly hairy fryer

‘At work, I had to clean the deep fryer. It was one of those huge fryers, and it was clogged. In the drain of the fryer, I found two rats, or at least what was left of them: mainly tufts of fur and bones. They had made their way through the drain into the grease pit in the fryer and had already been there for a month or two. So all the frying fat had been filtered through a natural colander made of two dead rats.’

Corn gets slimy

‘The manager chewed me out when I threw away corn kernels that had become completely slimy. The plan was to rinse them in the sink and simply put them back in the salad bar.’

Hairy arms

‘I saw two guys making coleslaw: they mixed the cabbage, carrots and mayonnaise together with their bare, hairy arms. And the container was so large that they were rummaging around in it up to about their armpits. So I don’t eat coleslaw anymore.’

Critters, cree-ee-eepy critters

‘In the storeroom: a large box full of potatoes covered in maggots. I threw it in the bin, and the manager got very angry about that. They fished them back out of the container, cut away the nibbled pieces, and then they could simply be used. I quit that same day.’

Chocolate with mushrooms

‘At the coffee shop where I work, we make our own chocolate sauce. That sounds delicious, but I now know that it starts to grow mold after a day or two. We sell enough chocolate sauce that we regularly make a new batch, but when it’s really busy, the new sauce simply gets poured onto the moldy old sauce. The container holding the warm sauce is only properly cleaned once a week.’

Sorry, the ice-cream machine is broken

We previously wrote about the bizarre reason why McDonald’s soft-serve machines are always broken. But there’s apparently more to it. ‘It’s not for no reason that you often hear that the ice-cream machine is out of order. Sometimes the machine really is being serviced, but we also often put it “out of order” when we have to remove all that nasty mold. One time I looked into the machine from above while putting new ice-cream mix in it—what a nightmare. I haven’t liked ice cream since.’

Dead bacteria

‘I accidentally dropped a large box of chicken burgers. Right in the middle of the kitchen, on the floor. I told the manager that the burgers should be put on the write-off list, but he said: no, just put them back in the box. We’ll fry them, and then the bacteria will die.’

Sticking on stickers

Brrr, those sticky things on the table—do you hate them too? Those sauce bottles that are completely tacky on the outside? Well, apparently it’s not just limited to that… ‘I worked at Burger King for six years. The food is really tasty when it’s fresh. The main problem was that colleagues couldn’t be bothered to clean the sauce bottles properly. And some employees don’t put on clean gloves very often either. We also had a sticker system so that things wouldn’t stay out of refrigeration for too long. For example, if you took cheese out of the refrigerator, you had to put a sticker on it with the time so you knew for sure it hadn’t been in the kitchen for longer than four hours. After that, you were supposed to throw it away. That never happened; they simply put on a new sticker.’

Read also:

• Ugh! Fried chicken turns out to be a baked towel
• Deep-frying experiment proves: almost anything can go in the oil
• 20x proof that seagulls don’t care that it’s actually your food

Source: BoredPanda