Why I hate salad bars

I love munching on all kinds of foliage, but would never eat from a salad bar. Why? Because they're breeding grounds for germs, and you always end up with unwanted crispy bacon bits.

In theory, the salad bar is an excellent idea. Choose from a huge range of bean, couscous, vegetable, pasta and rice dishes, each marinated in their own sticky sauce; top with croutons, cheese, raisins or bacon bits; and complete with a drizzle of exotic dressing. Every office worker has the potential to create a completely unique lunch that's far more exciting than a bog standard sarnie.

Eat your germs

However, the execution is all wrong. I bake for a farmers’ market, and we’re not allowed to sell our produce unless each cake is individually wrapped and tightly sealed – quite right too, for who wants to eat a lemon drizzle which has been prodded by dozens of strangers? I apply the same mentality to salad bars, which almost always come without ‘sneeze guards’ (yes, even you Waitrose).

Goodness knows how many people have retched, coughed, sneezed or scratched their heads over the salad bar before you reach it at 1pm. And it gives me no pleasure to report that I once saw a man help himself while a plaster hanging off the palm of his hand dragged through every salad he hovered over. I also witnessed a child swirl its fingers through the Mediterranean couscous once, although it’s usually adults who inflict the most damage.  

Consider the spoons used to scoop up your salad too... how many dirty keyboard fingers have touched those? Bleurgh. 

Waiter, waiter! There’s bacon in my pineapple!

The second salad bar problem is cross-contamination. Harvester seems to be the worst for this. When I first visited my local establishment in St Albans, I was impressed by the generosity of their ‘unlimited salad bar’ – free with any main course!

But people go crazy when you offer them free food … they pile tiny bowls high with mountains of salad that will no doubt be wasted, and the process of filling that bowl is completed as quickly as possible, for fear that the unlimited salad offer might run out any second. The result of such animalistic behaviour is pure carnage: blobs of Thousand Island dressing on the sweetcorn, bits of crispy bacon in the pineapple, and soggy croutons floating in the fat-free vinaigrette. It’s enough to make a food writer cry.

This is what Harvester said when I put the problem to them: "Our Harvester salad cart is very popular with guests and we regularly check and refill the cart to make sure it stays fresh and tidy." Fair enough.

The veggie problem

You can sort of scoop around the invading croutons, but for vegetarians this cross-contamination issue poses a much more serious threat. My veggie mum gets nervous about meat being cooked in the same pan as her food when eating out, so if there’s a crispy bacon bit in the iceberg lettuce, she’ll have to avoid that entirely. And although you’re supposed to return the serving spoon to the same salad you got it from, the fact of the matter is you can never know which one’s been used for meat.

I was uncomfortable with cross-contamination even as a little girl, eating at Pizza Hut. They had an ‘ice cream factory’ for pudding (and still do), where you would squeeze whipped frozen stuff out of a machine and into a bowl, and then cover it with sweeties. Kids being kids, podgy hands were used as scoops, sweets were often nibbled and sucked before committing them to a bowl, and the floor was always littered with discarded chocolate sprinkles. With scarring experiences like that, it’s no wonder I no longer eat at Harvester.

Do you have a problem with salad bars? Or do you think I’m being too fussy? Talk to us in the Comments box below.

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