Salad bars and buffets in general scare me slightly, primarily because the thought of strangers touching my food is just not one I want to entertain.
Which is why I would like to offer any germophobes out there a clear warning that what I am about to show you is likely to cause some distress.
A man has been filmed eating soup from a salad bar straight from the ladle, before putting the ladle back into the soup pot for others to use.
Gross, right? An eagle-eyed shopper spotted the man and filmed him, before posting it to social media for the whole world to witness.
Twitter account @wtfvids_ posted the video last week (October 27) and it quickly gained thousands of likes.
The video was captioned:
Something to think about the next time you eat at the salad bar.
Something to think about indeed. The man can be seen picking up the ladle, bringing the soup up to his mouth and sipping it not once, not twice, not thrice but FOUR TIMES.
He then appears to finally have had enough of the food and puts the ladle back down into the container – not before contaminating the entire thing first though.
I’m just not sure what would possess someone to do such a thing. Surely if you wanted to try the soup first you could just ask for a taster cup?!
Can you tell I’m really passionate about this?
The video appears to have originated from Reddit user u/bubbly48, who posted it shortly before the Twitter account did.
Captioned exactly the same, the post quickly went viral and received tens and thousands of upvotes in a short period of time.
Understandably, people called the act ‘disgusting’, ‘nasty’ and ‘inconsiderate’, with many commenting that they work in the food industry and have never seen such a thing happen.
And it would appear that this isn’t the man’s first time doing it, as the original poster commented beneath the video saying this was in fact the second flavour he had tried.
When confronted about why he hadn’t intervened and stopped the man instead of taking a video, the poster commented that security were made aware of the incident and approached the man.
No further details were given about the man’s fate (or the soup’s), but hopefully store management were made aware and removed the germ infested pot from the store.
And it seems that people just can’t help themselves when it comes to buffets, as one restaurant in China found out recently.
An all-you-can-eat restaurant in the Chengdu region of China was forced to declare bankruptcy earlier this year due to its customers eating too much.
Jiamener restaurant went bankrupt just two weeks after putting a membership card promotion in place. The card cost approximately £19 and entitled its holders to unlimited food for a month.
But the restaurant failed to anticipate the sheer volume of customers who would share it with their friends and family, resulting in long queues forming outside the restaurant at all hours of the day.
I mean, with an offer that good, who’s really going to be able to resist? Personally, I’d pass on the buffet. You can’t be too safe.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).