Few people can conceive of a situation that inspires as much disgust as finding cockroaches on a freshly served dinner plate. Sadly, this scenario becomes a reality more often than you would probably think. Restaurants are forced to close everyday after inspections reveal insect infestations. In fact, your favorite restaurant has probably closed in order for management to properly address insect infestation issues in the past. After learning that a restaurant had been caught with insects roaming the premises, you would likely avoid returning to such a location out of disgust. This response is understandable, but an overreaction nevertheless, as restaurants are typically allowed to reopen immediately, and without notice following a passing inspection. Much of the time, people are not even aware of a local restaurant’s closing, and pest control issues can sometimes be kept from the public. Although it is inevitable that some types of insects will occasionally gain entrance into local eateries, there is no excusing a freshly served bowl of soup that contains eight cockroaches. Amazingly, a restaurant employee in China somehow managed to miss several cockroaches contained within a bowl of soup before it was placed onto the patron’s table.
Given the long tradition of edible insect consumption in China, eating cockroaches is not as common in the country as some westerners would assume. In fact, most Chinese citizens view cockroach species with disgust, similar to the American attitude toward cockroaches. The manner in which the restaurant customer reacted to the cockroach presence in her soup illustrates the level of disgust that most Chinese citizens have toward cockroaches. Instead of welcoming the cockroaches as a desirable extra ingredient in her soup, the woman gasped and spit out her food upon learning that she had just bit into a cockroaches’ exoskeleton. The woman then found seven more cockroaches within her soup. After the woman complained to management, she was told that the cockroaches had likely been brought into the restaurant by the two women themselves. The customer was understandably offended by the accusation, as she had just unwittingly bitten into a cockroach. She took her complaints to the police, and an investigation into the matter is currently underway.
If you ordered soup from a restaurant that contained eight cockroaches, would you suspect a kitchen worker of being responsible for deliberately contaminating your food?