To be fair this is a good idea underdeveloped countries as canned drinks in storage are usually contaminated externally with rat shit.
This is true of warehouses everywhere, not just ones in underdeveloped countries. Developed countries just usually have a higher turnover and distribution closer to production sources, so they sit in storage for less time.
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I’ve worked at a few warehouses picking orders and I second this. At least in the US health and building codes require rodent traps and inspections happen regularly. While I’m sure infestations happen businesses that want to stay open follow the law and get pests under control.
It’s amusing seeing people who clearly haven’t spent time in warehouses tell internet strangers that warehouses have rats.
A single rat sighting inside a US food-grade warehouse is a serious event.
I’ve personally tasked people to chase around a bird and shove it out the door for 2 hours because you can’t just allow it to exist.
Wow, in other manufacturing I’ve had to call something “biologically contaminated” to mean that the bird infestation in the warehouse is out of control but we can’t convince anyone to pay to fix it
Did they kill it when it was out the door or did they just allow it to exist?
The deed was done and it deserved its fate
Ha! I was picturing a dollar general when I wrote that. The last time I was in a major warehouse it was also for a discount reseller.
That place was horrifying, trash and spoiled food everywhere and rats running around like they owned the place.
Are you sure it wasn’t just a regular dollar general
The John Oliver piece on them was the first look I’d had at them in twenty years, absolutely baffling, and just pure neoliberalism in action.
Do you drink the soda by pouring it over its outer hide?
You somehow forgot a whole word. How the fuck does that even happen?
Among many, many other far simpler explanations, it’s pretty common for people with ADHD.
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How even notice there’s a missing word?
My neighbor died. My 34-year-old coworker died. Those early days of COVID were fucking terrifying.
I tended to get every flu and every diarrhoea even before the pandemic. One day I decided to wash my hands thoroughly after shopping. Then came the pandemic. I am not making this up but I haven’t had any sickness for eighth years. No flu, no diarrhoea. I didn’t even catch COVID. Just because I started washing my hands a bit more often, around half a dozen times a day.
The eight years since the pandemic really have flown by…
He didn’t say he started with COVID, he started ‘and then came the pandemic’.
That’s because people are generally disgusting. I’d have to guess that if you talked to basically edit:
anyoneany scientist about the best way to reduce illness of any sort, they’d say “just wash your hands properly.”You never take public transport or interact with kids?
I drove a 1000k to the french alps just before the covid thing got traction. We do 4 restroom stops. I was always virtually alone washing my hands. The day we returned the ski resorts closed and lockdown was imminent. Now there was a wait to wash your hands. You had people screaming for soap and washing for 5 minutes straight up to their armpits. I just drove past the same restroom stops again. I was alone in washing my hands again. People are stupid.
That should be common sense, you arrive from street let the shoes at the door or outside if you can, wash your hands. You’re in the street Shopping or using public transportation, dont touch your face, wash your hands when you arrive somewhere.
“why not just wipe them with disinfectant wipes?”
“oh, you sweet summer child”
Ugh, I bought 100% alcohol by the gallon and made my own 70% disinfectant spray cause it was easier for me to source a full gallon of industrial alcohol than get a package of Clorox wipes.
I almost forgot that shit!
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They were selling like crazy so half the time they were sold out
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Do I get any credit for never having done this?
It depends… Did you wear a mask at the store? And have you ever taken Horse Dewormer?
Oh god I forgot about the weirdos and the fucking horse dewormer 🤣
Some of them still take it when they get sick
As did people before COVID
They take it for everything but worms though.
Well, it did win the nobel prize for being multifaceted
Yeah for treating different kinds of parasites not viruses
A tsp of bleach a day keeps the doctor away
Sadly, no it won’t. Because we’ve royally fucked over the planet for ourselves and things like this will only become more common. Not necessarily exactly this picture, but the age of crisis is well upon us and will only get worse from here. Your grandkids will understand because they’re in for much worse.
Maybe we’ve reached the conclusion of the Fermi paradox. Only that WE won’t be sending anything out there anymore.
I have no idea what’s going on in this photo.
Washing groceries to avoid getting covid
Which was always overkill because Covid doesn’t really transmit by touching contaminated surfaces like the flu does.
But we didn’t know that at first. Even the experts had no clue how it transmitted and had to just be like “assume it spreads in all the ways until we can figure out how it spreads.” And then of course once they knew people needed to mask, they told people not to mask for a good while. At least in the U.S…
The logic was “medical workers need masks more than anyone else, so we have to tell everyone not to mask to save our reserves of masks.” But they didn’t say “don’t mask to save reserves for medical workers.” They said “you don’t need to mask.” (Fauci himself was saying this knowing full well people needed to mask.)
There was an early scientific paper that suggested the Covid virus was surviving for 5 days on surfaces. Turned out only to be in extremely optimal conditions, but still very sobering
Can’t believe they didn’t ask us to make homemade masks… some would’ve still made a run on store-bought masks, but we could’ve been a little better protected. (Protected better by how much much still seems to be hard to determine exactly?)
Sometimes I forget how fucking weird 2020 was. I joined a group of people at my local church who were sewing masks. I didn’t know how to sew, but I could cut fabric. I’d bike across town (too young to drive… wait a second, 2020 was four years ago, holy fuck) to pick up a bag of fabric with instructions included, then drop off the cut pieces at another house. The weirdest part is that I never met anyone in the group, save for the one person I talked to over facebook messenger.
They were strange times. ¯\(°_o)/¯
Love that emoticon, first time I’ve seen it.
Yeah. I certainly made my own homenade masks when bought ones were scarce.
They did! There was a a video by the US surgeon general showing how to make a mask out of a t-shirt and rubber bands. That was an unexpectedly spooky video.
I remember that!
I should’ve been clear that I was referring to only the earliest days of the pandemic. Wikipedia’s summary jives with my memory:
Federal officials initially discouraged the general public from wearing masks for protecting themselves from COVID-19. In early April, federal officials reversed their guidance, saying that the general public should wear masks to lessen transmission by themselves, particularly from asymptomatic carriers.
That was not a “known” thing right when the lockdowns kicked off.
Was that like an American thing? Never heard of it before now.
Nah some people did it in the UK. We were in a bubble with some vulnerable people so we were being really careful despite not being at high risk personally
They’re washing the packaging of their groceries to try to avoid covid.
I never knew that was a thing.
Good times.
Washing your stuff.
The picturen is too cropped to know if he’s also washing his stuff
I think I’m going to continue washing apples, cucumbers, things like that.
I was a farmer; you should. Especially potatoes and fruit.
There’s not even any dirt on potatoes. They must pressure wash them, (you also don’t eat them raw).
I worked in a produce department for a bit and the lettuce definitely had dirt and the occasional bug in it before we trimmed and rinsed it
You should know that lettuce is not a potato then.
Mind = Blown
Source?
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Lettuce is also the most common vegetable to be infected by salmonella.
All lettuce or certain varieties?
I still give them a good rinse and rub with a sponge.
I was doing it before COVID. I don’t know who’s hands have touched it or where those hands had been prior to touching it. I’m not gonna get fucked up by Typhoid Mary picking her ass and then touching something I plan to eat.
Always wash the dirty dozen!
- Strawberries
- Spinach
- Kale, Collard and Mustard Greens
- Peaches
- Pears
- Nectarines
- Apples
- Grapes
- Bell and Hot Peppers
- Cherries
- Blueberries
- Green Beans
Well that’s pesticides. My list is related to warehouse gunk, rats, people coughing on them, etc.
*PSA: to get rid of pesticides soak in baking soda bath. They break down.
It’s not just pesticides. You can get residual germs from bad agricultural practices, which is why we get E. coli and listeria outbreaks from vegetables.
Yes but the “dirty dozen” specifically refers to pesticides.
John Oliver torched a head of lettuce, while talking about that. https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg
I’m aware, just adding to the conversation is all
You didn’t wash fruits and vegetables until Covid came?
When I got home from the store and in soap and water? No. It was a rinse off with water when you ate it.
Okay. Phew. I was hoping no one just ate everything without a rinse. But soap? Really?
Ironic that whoever is washing the Pepsi and Cheetos has a much higher risk of dying from heart disease than COVID.
Is this not a healthy breakfast?
Before covid some groceries (mostly fruits/vegetables) lasted 1 week or a little more. After that sometimes 2 or more, just today I cut a pineapple that it’s 3 weeks old. I’m going to keep washing them.
And it’s really nice to just open the fridge and just bite the apple w/o needing to wash it (again).
I watched a documentary on DWTV about a similiar phenomena in Germany. There was a specific sort of bread, a cheap one, which stood fresh for two weeks if packed well. During the pandemic it suddenly stood fresh for NINE MONTHS. The finder of that bread was some sort of forensic specialist and because during the pandemic crime pretty much vanished he had too much time and explored that phenomena.
So, did they put more chemicals into the bread to keep it more fresh?
Actually, no. wholemeal bread stays due to the acid produced by the leavening during baking which is a natural process. Actually ALL bread stays in theory fresh “forever”.
But. If it gets contaminated with fungus spores then those can slowly break up acids in the bread. Well, the final verdict was: Before the pandemic most bakers were so fucking dirty and contaminated that they pretty much only delivered fungus-contaminated bread. During the pandemic though the bakers were required to sanitize their work space and themselves a lot more thorough. And that made the bread free of fungus.
The forensic specialist has kept another bread for over three years now. It is as fresh as the first day. No chemicals involved, just wrapped airtight into a plastic foil.
Glad to know we only get fungal bread
So does that mean sourdough bread lasts longer?
How do you dry things? I’ve tried pre-washing things before to reduce the friction to cooking, but everything always go bad so much faster because of the extra moisture.
I bought a few metres of calico, because it’s a cheap, close weave natural fibre.Cut it into sheets the size of a tea towel with pinking shears (because I’m too lazy to hem anything)
When I wash produce, I lay it out to air dry on the sheets, and I throw a dry sheet into the tub or container I’m storing the veg in to continue wicking moisture.
If I’m in a rush I’ll pat dry and rub dry produce that I can, but mostly it’s laying it out to air dry, either on the counter or in the fridge itself before going back and putting the dry veg in a proper container.
I’ll occasionally swap out the cotton in a container for a fresh dry sheet if the produce in the fridge is getting soggy. Things like lettuce and spinach for example, I’ll give them a fresh dry sheet at least once a week and they’ll last 2-3 weeks for me.
I tend to wash everything in a weak dilution of vinegar, in my experience that reduces moulding.
I don’t have a salad spinner so when I want to spin something dry, I wash it and then put it in a mesh produce bag, go outside, and spin the bag around like a human windmill.
All the calico sheets just get thrown in the wash with all my actual tea towels and kitchen towels. If they get really gross they can be boiled to sterile clean them, or worse case scenario, composted.
Yes I do dry them with a cloth towel, some things that trap moisture can’t be washed like onions. Bananas for example usually skip them, if they have a small scratch/cut they tend to rot from the filtration tho.
You wash your pineapples with soap and water?
you sound like you’re not even washing coconuts
Reading comprehension wasn’t that strong in your elementary school isn’t it?
Woosh
The dark days of instacarting groceries and having everything smell like the inside of a smokers car
Yeah, this is disturbing, like what the fuck are you doing??!!
Washing off the 'vid.
Huh.
That doesn’t strike me as a likely vector, given that most viruses don’t survive on hard surfaces very long. If you’re going to that kind of extreme, you would really need to be setting up an airlock on your house so that you could change and shower before going inside. For people that worked in hospitals with covid-19 patients, where they had very high exposures, that was a real thing that helped reduce spread. But the average person? It’s just not a big enough risk.
FWIW, I had covid-19 once, and it was after I’d gotten my vaccination and booster (very mild case), and that was with pretty basic precautions like washing my hands, not going to indoor gatherings, and wearing a respirator with P-100 filter cartridges whenever I was in public.
At the beginning of the pandemic people didn’t know much about COVID and did whatever they could to keep safe. Especially in high risk households. As better research became available many of the approaches such as wiping down groceries got used less.
Sanitizing groceries to prevent covid.
I much prefer just setting everything on fire
Everyone who did this is fucking stupid, respiratory illness spreads in coughs and sneezes, (aerosolized fluids), not on surfaces.
To be fair, we had zero knowledge of what would or wouldn’t spread the virus around march/april 2020
Very weird not to use dishwashing gloves for that. It’s like taking a photo of yourself as an example of brushing your teeth and forgetting to use toothpaste. It’s just so strange that it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t done on purpose.
Curious as to what difference gloves would make in this specific situation according to you? You’re washing everything with soap to “disinfect” it. Your bare hands will also be full of soap. Wouldn’t they also get disinfected? What am I missing?
Washing up gloves are there to protect your hands from the heat of the water. I do find it strange to say it’s like brushing your teeth without toothpaste though.
How hot are you washing your dishes? Are we supposed to be washing them at really high temperatures?
It’s just another way of making it easier I suppose. They also drip-dry quicker if they’re hot.
I doubt you’re washing food in temperatures that would actually burn your skin :)
I would in fact tell people to only wash food in cold water!
Gloves were one of those things that were very hard to find for a while (I remember seeing boxes of gloves on Amazon for $60 or something like that).
