SINGAPORE: After a video of a diner eating food that had fallen onto a table at a hiker centre was shared online, and many reacted to it, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) appealed to everyone to have a bit more common sense in this type of situation.
The SFA oversees food safety and security in the city-state, and one of its functions is to protect public health, ensuring that eateries such as hawker centres and restaurants maintain hygiene standards.
It also educates the public on food safety practices, which can include busting hygiene myths such as the “three-second rule” for when someone drops food.
In a LinkedIn post on Sunday (June 21), the SFA responded to the video, writing, “C’mon, please don’t do this 😥 Once food is dropped on an unclean tabletop, the surface of the food item would have been contaminated by bacteria, and there is no such thing as the ‘three-second rule’ either.”
The May 27 video had originally been posted on TikTok, which was then shared on Reddit, and then featured in an article in 8days. It showed a woman at a hawker centre, with her back to the camera, picking up with chopsticks some noodles that were not on a plate but on the table itself.
“Would you put your food on the table, like on a plate, even though you’ve already cleared it?” the post author, @rina57521, wrote.
When it was shared on Reddit, some users on the platform had pretty strong reactions.
“That’s really disgusting,” one wrote, while another chimed in with, “That is so gross! The heck, who does this???”
Another wondered why her dining companions did not stop the woman in the video from eating off the table.
“Hawker tables are never clean. The cleaners often reuse the same damp rags over and over again. The only thing it does is spread the oily residues evenly across the table. That is why I always bring alcohol wipes,” a commenter added.
Others said that they wouldn’t even put cutlery on the trays and tables in food courts and hawker centres.
“I know Singapore is clean, but it’s not that clean,” one wrote. /TISG
Read also: SFA suspends 6 eateries for sanitation and toilet violations
