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There's no better time to treat yourself to a refreshing glass of soda than when you're out to eat at your favorite restaurant. But if you're dining at a chain restaurant, employees say that ordering soda isn't the best idea. Several waiters have revealed that their restaurants never have clean soda guns and machines, which means that your soda may have a lot of questionable things floating in it...
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"Those freestyle soda machines almost always have mold up in the ice chute unless the chute is fully taken out and the inner bit actively scrubbed every night, which I would not trust is actually done regularly anywhere," an employee said, according to Food + Wine.
A former employee also recalled finding BUGS behind his restaurant's soda machine! "Right underneath the surface of what looked like such an inviting piece of machinery was one of the grossest things I’d ever seen: dozens upon dozens of cockroaches, little medium-sized ones, frightened by the sudden exposure to light, running around in ribbons of brown as they made a desperate attempt to slink back into the shadows," writer Rob Gunther recalled.
Now that you're freaked out about the soda machines, know that you should also be wary of how most restaurants handle the lemons that are often served with the soft drink. Researchers from the Journal of Health swabbed the rinds and flesh of 76 lemons from 21 restaurants collected during 43 visits and found that a whopping 70 percent of them produced microbial growth. Yikes!
You can beat that we'll be ordering a water with our meal the next time we're out to eat -- and we hope you will too!
