04-07-2019, 09:20 PM
Here's one business model that could fail: the restaurant buffet. It's not for the finances (although those places operate on a razor-thin margin to price-sensitive people, which is a poor sort of business to be in when the economy takes a nosedive or tastes change.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/4/3/1...den-corral
The problem is that food must either be very cold or outright hot to not be vulnerable to bacteria that can make people terribly sick. The food can be made cheaply in batches and be self-service, so it does not need the wait staff that a sit-down restaurant has, People may be serving themselves some E. Coli with their fried rice, french fries, or lettuce.
(My apology if you have just gorged yourself at such a place).
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/4/3/1...den-corral
The problem is that food must either be very cold or outright hot to not be vulnerable to bacteria that can make people terribly sick. The food can be made cheaply in batches and be self-service, so it does not need the wait staff that a sit-down restaurant has, People may be serving themselves some E. Coli with their fried rice, french fries, or lettuce.
Quote:The existence of “fried rice syndrome,” is, I think, the factoid that eviscerated my innate human curiosity, probably forever. Brought to my attention by Laurel Dunn, a microbiologist and assistant professor of food science at the University of Georgia, “fried rice syndrome” is actually just a colloquial term for vomiting and diarrhea brought on by consuming Bacillus cereus, a “Gram-positive, rod-shaped, aerobic, facultatively anaerobic, motile, beta-hemolytic bacterium,” which can survive, as a spore, being boiled and fried, then come out the other side ready to germinate and grow when left at room temperature.
Food safety experts consider the range between 41 degrees and 135 degrees Fahrenheit the “danger zone.” Keep food cold or keep it hot; there is no in between — or there is, but that’s where foodborne pathogens grow best, replicating, getting ready to hurt you, Dunn explains.
"Lukewarm food is where foodborne pathogens grow best, replicating, getting ready to hurt you"
B. cereus is one of the most common causes of food poisoning, and its presence in fried rice was first studied in 1974. Yet “fried rice syndrome” had its first big spike in Google search interest in 2007. I cannot deduce why! But then it had another in 2015, when the USDA issued a warning about preventing foodborne illnesses, specifically fried rice-borne illnesses. And then another last year, when a 62-year-old Texas woman sued her local Chinese buffet for $1 million in damages after she contracted “fried rice syndrome” that put her in the ICU for eight days.
(My apology if you have just gorged yourself at such a place).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.