Food hygiene in Thailand

[gerefan2]

The Thai are clean - .

Never seen a Thai toilet? Never seen the disgusting toilets in Toyboys or Eros? Clean they are not. Try the toilets on a Motorway then eat in their restaurants. Guaranteed problems.

I have been waiting 3 years for them to repair the 100 baht toilet roll holder in Toyboys and the leaking basin. What the women customers think when they sit on the flooded toilet I don't know.

And Thais are clean????

[sglad]

Never seen a Thai toilet? Never seen the disgusting toilets in Toyboys or Eros? Clean they are not. Try the toilets on a Motorway then eat in their restaurants. Guaranteed problems.

I have been waiting 3 years for them to repair the 100 baht toilet roll holder in Toyboys and the leaking basin. What the women customers think when they sit on the flooded toilet I don't know.

And Thais are clean????

paborn, I'm inclined to agree with gerefan on this one. While the working boys you've been with may have maintained a high standard of personal hygiene (good for them and you!), I wouldn't assume the same high standards of the general population. I'm in no way saying that they are filthy or worse off than people in X country. All I'm saying is that standards of cleanliness vary within Thailand as it does in all countries. At the student apartment building I was staying in Chiang Mai, the manager told me that I was one of the few tenants who got their full room deposits back; many of the Thai students didn't get theirs as they left their rooms in quite a state. Having been to some of their rooms, I can attest to that! Toilets that haven't been scrubbed in a year - yuck!

As for hawker food - which I too enjoy sometimes - just look at the rats playing in the drains nearby and sometimes running across your feet. Wait after the stalls have closed late at night and you'll see them crawling and nibbling all over the place. They're quite cute and chubby.

[Nirish guy]

- just look at the rats playing in the drains nearby and sometimes running across your feet.

In a strange way Bangkok has actually helped me re that as I'm guessing like most people I have / had a fairly high fear / dislike / terror of being anywhere near a rat, to the point of taking my breath away, making me freeze on the spot and thinking I was going to have a heart attack if I seen one within 500 yards of me. Now after so many forced ridiculously close encounters with rats as described above my fear has now decreased from thinking I'm going to die to just mildly shitting myself / disgusted - so i guess in a way Bkk has acted as a good aversion therapy towards the problem - as Sglad says though with the amount of them running wild over and under closed food stalls and all sorts I dread to think of the diseases being left in their wake :-(

Ps before anyone says I'm going off topic I would stress that I'm talking about BLACK rats, that are I believe, along with their brown cousins, very common in Thailand and I'm surmising that at least a few may be slightly gay ......so, there we go, right back on topic, black and gay in thailand !! :-)

[sglad]

Ps before anyone says I'm going off topic I would stress that I'm talking about BLACK rats, that are I believe, along with their brown cousins, very common in Thailand and I'm surmising that at least a few may be slightly gay ......so, there we go, right back on topic, black and gay in thailand !! :-)

Well, if you did go off-topic, Sister Marie-Francoise will be along shortly with her big black ruler (which she hides under her habit and uses for various things, ahem) to give you a hard knock on your knuckles.

[gerefan2]

Whatever...but don't anyone tell me Thais are clean...

[paborn]

paborn, I'm inclined to agree with gerefan on this one. While the working boys you've been with may have maintained a high standard of personal hygiene (good for them and you!), I wouldn't assume the same high standards of the general population. I'm in no way saying that they are filthy or worse off than people in X country. All I'm saying is that standards of cleanliness vary within Thailand as it does in all countries. At the student apartment building I was staying in Chiang Mai, the manager told me that I was one of the few tenants who got their full room deposits back; many of the Thai students didn't get theirs as they left their rooms in quite a state. Having been to some of their rooms, I can attest to that! Toilets that haven't been scrubbed in a year - yuck!

As for hawker food - which I too enjoy sometimes - just look at the rats playing in the drains nearby and sometimes running across your feet. Wait after the stalls have closed late at night and you'll see them crawling and nibbling all over the place. They're quite cute and chubby.

Your probably right, both you and Gerefan. I'm overastating my case. I find the Thai to be peronaly clean. I think, honestly, that I went a tad overboard in response to a SILLY argument. I still maintain that style of cooking has utterly nothing to do with type of food. If you keep a clean kitchen it's clean for any damn food. Otherwise you guys are right.

[arsenal]

I was really only talking about restaurants, not street vendors or go go bars.

[paborn]

So was I. I make no health claims for street vendors.

[sglad]

I still maintain style of cooking has utterly nothing to do with type of food. If you keep a clean kitchen it's clean for any damn food.

Agree completely. If the food is prepared in the same kitchen, the same level for hygiene can be assumed for all the dishes.

A side point about Thai cooking and Old Git's assertion that it is more hygienic. I beg to differ. A lot of Thai dishes contain dried or fermented ingredients like kapi or shrimp paste. Have you seen how kapi is prepared? Fine if it's prepared in factories with quality control but there are some cooks/restaurants that insist on 'authentic', homemade stuff. Same with dried fruit. Have you seen how they are dried? Again, fine if it is done on a large scale, controlled environment but I've seen strawberries and longans being dried on the ground by smaller producers with their dogs walking all over the place. What about khao soy and kway teow noodles? Yup, some Chinese family-owned restaurants still insist on making their own in their backyard...I leave it to your imagination but I must say they are often the tastiest. And let's not forget Thai boat noodles in pig's blood...how clean is the blood? Yum yum or should I say, "Oink! Oink!" And famous northern Thai sausages...the list goes on.

As for rats, I've seen them at mid range restaurants too (where you can get dishes for under 200Bt) and Thai customers would often coo how they cute they are when one scampers across. Oooh, nuu naarak maak.

[frequent]

Mine too. Observe the vendors selling cheap (to us, anyway) food on the pavements; they always wear plastic gloves...

Yes but that is a very, very recent innovation, and not universally followed