Amy went out for dinner last night with some uni colleagues.
She checked out the menu beforehand – as you do when living with a food safety type for 10 years – and I was encouraged by the 50C salmon and 65C eggs.
Unfortunately, this was the summer menu and it’s winter here.
And I noticed the aioli on the menu, and asked Amy, ask the server if it’s made with raw eggs.
Of course it was.
When those questions are asked in a restaurant, servers think you want to hear whatever is fashionable.
Ten years ago I was sitting in a B.C. restaurant with Chapman and a provincial health inspector, and ordered fish, and asked, is it farmed or wild?
He assured me it was wild.
I said I wanted farmed because that left a smaller ecological footprint.
He said, no one had ever asked for farmed, and eventually admitted that yeah, some of it was farmed.
So how are consumers supposed to know?
They don’t. It’s all faith-based.
I made dinner for Amy before she went out.
She didn’t eat the aioli.
While it’s nice that Dr Paul Armstrong, chairman of the Communicable Diseases Network Australia, acknowledged the other day that, “We have an ongoing problem with salmonella infections linked with chickens, particularly eggs,” it doesn’t help diners who are served raw-egg aioli.