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Think you know what's really on your plate? Join us as we count down the most unsettling truths lurking behind your favorite restaurant meals! From dirty ice and contaminated lemon wedges to mechanically separated meat and burgers made from dozens of cows, the food service industry has plenty of stomach-turning secrets. Will you ever eat out the same way again?
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00:00They probably do get slimy if they're not held cold enough, or if they're sitting in their own juice for
00:05a long time.
00:06Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the most troubling truths about the food service industry.
00:12The first thing we do is we add a little extra gravy to the mashed potatoes.
00:23Number 10, frozen food.
00:25You serve frozen products. And yes, of course, we should not hide it. Everyone does it.
00:30When you go to your favorite dining spot, you might picture chefs dicing fresh herbs and searing fresh cuts of
00:35meat.
00:35Behind the kitchen doors, though, there's a decent chance they're just cracking open a freezer.
00:39In the post-pandemic era, more restaurants than ever are leaning on frozen foods.
00:44In 2022, over 90% of restaurants regularly used frozen items like vegetables and desserts.
00:50Try to get people to look at them in a different way, so that you can really, you know, get
00:54lots of flavor, lots of texture,
00:55and really create gourmet meals out of frozen bodies.
00:57One report claims that 55% of all restaurants brought frozen seafood.
01:02Chains like Applebee's, Olive Garden, and Outback have been called out for relying heavily on frozen meat and sides.
01:08It's not always a bad thing. Frozen ingredients cut costs, reduce waste, and streamline prep.
01:12But if you're imagining farm-to-table freshness, you might be eating table-to-freezer to microwave instead.
01:18So far, our results show vegetables that degrade quickly or take a long time to get from field to supermarket,
01:25hit better nutritional figures when frozen.
01:29Number 9. Eggs are sometimes made from powder.
01:32Think that fluffy scramble at the continental breakfast came from freshly cracked eggs?
01:36Think again. Powdered eggs, dehydrated and reconstituted with water and heat,
01:40are widely used in the food service industry.
01:43They're a staple of hotel breakfast buffets and large-scale kitchens.
01:46They're cheaper, shelf-stable, and easy to portion out in bulk.
01:50And they still contain all the protein, vitamins, and minerals you expect.
01:53All you sacrifice is texture and flavor.
01:56Fast food chains have largely moved away from powdered eggs.
01:59Instead, they like to use folded eggs, or egg patties,
02:02stabilized with soybean oil, cornstarch, and other ingredients before being flash-frozen.
02:07Unless you see it cracked in front of you,
02:08that egg may have come from a bag, a box, or a bucket.
02:13Number 8. Dirty Ice
02:14It's a good thing Houston restaurant inspectors are out there,
02:18because you can't inspect the ice machine yourself as a customer.
02:21That refreshing, frosty clink in your glass might be nastier than you think.
02:26Ice machines are notoriously hard to clean,
02:28and often skip during routine sanitation at restaurants.
02:31That means your ice cubes could be swimming with mold, bacteria, or worse.
02:35A combination of infrequent cleanings and cross-contamination from dirty hands or utensils
02:40can make ice downright disgusting.
02:42The health inspection report listed,
02:44excessive mildew in an ice machine, toxic substances not stored properly.
02:50In some cases, studies have found restaurant ice dirtier than toilet water.
02:54According to food safety expert, dirty ice can harbor E. coli, norovirus, and salmonella.
02:59If your drink tastes a little off, it might not be the soda.
03:02It might be the slime lurking in the ice bin.
03:04It will make you, you know, vomit.
03:07It could cause diarrhea.
03:09Bad stuff.
03:10Number 7. Fish Fraud
03:12If you pay a very cheap price on the fillet,
03:15you're not buying what you're supposed to be getting.
03:17Pescatarians, beware.
03:18Your red snapper might be tilapia in disguise.
03:21According to studies by Oceana and NPR,
03:24one in three fish sold at U.S. restaurants and grocery stores are mislabeled.
03:28Restaurants are worse offenders.
03:30High-end species like grouper, tuna, or snapper are frequently swapped for cheaper, low-quality alternatives.
03:36Scooping out the crunchy grouper.
03:38We then packed the fish up and sent samples off to a lab for DNA testing.
03:43You may be opting for a light, healthy meal only to get a dose of mercury or unexpected allergies.
03:48It's almost a certainty that your fried fish sandwiches are not as advertised.
03:52By the time it's battered and sauced, it's nearly impossible to tell what's really under the crust.
03:56Whether it's a shady supplier or a kitchen cutting corners, fish fraud is rampant.
04:02You will likely never know what you actually ate.
04:04But once the fish has landed, who's making sure there's no fishy business by the retailers and the restaurateurs?
04:09Number six, old grease.
04:12Yeah, so basically all you do is just like squirt the meat real good with this bottle of grease here,
04:18and then you just sort of, you know, rub it in there into the meat using a dish towel or
04:25a tissue or, you know, a sweat sock, whatever's handy.
04:29Your crispy fries and golden nuggets might have been fried up in weeks old oil.
04:33Some restaurants reuse their deep fryer oil far past its expiration point.
04:37Filtering the oil can extend its longevity and help save some cash, but it still needs to be replaced eventually.
04:42Now that you've cleansed your pellets with some water, here's curry puff number three. Go for it.
04:53As oil breaks down, it turns dark, starts foaming, and picks up rancid, burnt flavors.
04:58And according to food safety experts, it's not just gross, it's potentially harmful.
05:03Degraded oil can release compounds linked to high blood pressure and vascular damage.
05:07But fresh oil is expensive, and many kitchens choose profit over quality.
05:11The worst offenders only swap out their fryer oil every few months.
05:15There is no official health guideline on how often hawkers should change their cooking oil.
05:22It doesn't help that cooking oil prices have gone up by 14.6% over the past five years.
05:29Number five, food waste is rampant.
05:32Think before you buy. Think before you waste.
05:35Whether you're a family or a big retailer.
05:39Behind every beautiful dish, there's often a garbage bag full of the same thing.
05:43Restaurants may be in the business of feeding people, but they also throw literal tons of food away.
05:48In the US, the industry trashes an estimated 22 to 33 billion pounds of food every year.
05:53That's not expired or moldy leftovers.
05:56We're talking about perfectly good ingredients and untouched plates scraped straight into the bin.
06:00Let me ask you something. How hard is your job?
06:04How intelligent do you have to be to take a food order?
06:08Even worse, less than 2% of that waste gets donated.
06:12Whether it's poor planning or oversized portions, food waste in restaurants is out of control.
06:16It's bad for the planet and bad for the bottom line.
06:19Meanwhile, behind the scenes, restaurant staff would be responsible for any unsold food at the end of the night.
06:25Suggestions to reduce waste include giving food away to charity, promoting seasonal dishes,
06:30and even turning overripe fruit into jams and chutneys.
06:344. Stale Salads
06:36Chipotle recently hired his company to assess and improve safety standards,
06:41after the government traced an outbreak of E. coli back to some of its stores.
06:45Salad bars may seem like the healthiest option on the menu, but more often than you'd think,
06:49they're a microbial minefield.
06:51Uncovered and left out for hours, salad bars are breeding grounds for bacteria like E. coli, salmonella, and listeria.
06:58Pre-made salads in kitchens aren't necessarily safer.
07:01Your leafy greens may be old and wilted, spritzed with water to fake freshness.
07:05One study even found that bad greens were among the most frequent sources of foodborne illness outbreaks.
07:10The next time you're eyeing that sneeze guard buffet of browning lettuce and crusty ranch, walk the other way.
07:16And another salad from Chili's has as much sodium as the daily recommended intake.
07:223. Dirty Lemons
07:24Turns out when lemons are sitting at a bar or accessible to consumers at, say, a fast food restaurant,
07:30those are the lemons that will most likely be contaminated.
07:33That innocent little lemon wedge in your water might be a gateway to an unpleasant night in the bathroom.
07:39Studies and food safety experts have found that restaurant lemons are ticking time bombs.
07:43They aren't refrigerated, often aren't washed, and are handled with bare hands.
07:47That means they're ripe for cross-contamination.
07:49There's liable to be some bacteria on cut lemons, but it should be very few, all right?
07:55And these have very few.
07:56These restaurants had a lot more on them than I would have particularly liked.
08:02One test of 21 restaurants revealed that nearly 70% of lemon wedges carried bacteria, including E. coli and fecal
08:09matter.
08:09Unlike your dinner, the lemon in your Diet Coke is never cooked and rarely sanitized.
08:14Any germs hitching a ride go straight into your drink.
08:16It's not a garnish so much as it's a germ grenade.
08:19When in doubt, skip the citrus.
08:20Lemons are considered a ready-to-eat food, which means they're going right from the server's hands to your drink.
08:26When they serve the lemons, they should also be using tongs or a fork or something like that.
08:30Number two, mechanically separated meat.
08:33The meat arrives here in 2,000-pound bins, so the first step in making a hot dog involves raking
08:39the meat into these smaller stainless steel carts.
08:41Mechanically separated meat sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, not something that should be on your dinner plate.
08:46MSM is a part of our everyday reality, enabling us to eat what's left after the good cuts are gone.
08:52Using high-pressure machines, producers force bones through a sieve to extract every last bit of edible material, tendons, cartilage,
08:59and connective tissue included.
09:01The result is a paste, a meat slurry, used in all kinds of processed staples.
09:06Hot dogs, nuggets, some cured meats, and processed deli meats all feature this more common-than-you'd-like staple of
09:12the American diet.
09:13The USDA allows it in pork and poultry.
09:15The mechanically separated beef has been banned since 2004 due to mad cow concerns.
09:20It's efficient, cost-saving, and 100% legal.
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09:39Number 1. How many cows does it take to make a burger?
09:42Let's take a peek at the killing floor.
09:45Don't let the name throw you, Jimmy. It's not really a floor.
09:48It's more of a steel grating that allows material to sluice through so it can be collected and exported.
09:53When you sink your teeth into a burger, the darker minds amongst you may try to picture the cow you're
09:57guzzling down.
09:58Unfortunately, you may not be thinking big enough.
10:01In most commercial ground beef, that patty could contain meat from dozens, sometimes up to 100 different cows.
10:07To meet demand and keep costs down, meat processors combine trimmings from animals raised across multiple farms, states, or even
10:14countries.
10:15It turns out, this simple meal may actually be a lot more complex than you think.
10:20Unfortunately, I don't think consumers realize exactly what goes into a single hamburger.
10:24This blending isn't just an unsettling factoid. Combining meat like that increases the risk of contamination.
10:30One tainted cut can affect an entire batch.
10:33Your burger might be labeled 100% beef, and that's not a lie.
10:36But when you think you're eating a single cow, you're really eating a herd.
10:39So we think that we've overcome every single reason that you would not want to eat beef, except that you
10:46just don't like the flavor.
10:48Any food industry insiders want to give us all the down and dirty scoop for our next night out?
10:52Let us know in the comments below.
10:54A lot of burger walking around, a lot of delicious burger walking around here.
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