Hard to stomach

We've all heard horror stories about finding unwelcome items in food. Yes, a strand of hair is off-putting but there are many objects that are far more disgusting and/or potentially dangerous: the (used) Band-Aid that a friend found in a siu mai (she wondered why it was so chewy); or the staple another friend found in a piece of suckling pig (the pig had been boned and stuffed with glutinous rice, so our guess is its stomach had been stapled together to prevent the filling from spilling out and the chef had forgotten to remove the staple). I recently found a sharp piece of plastic in a rice dish served at a Korean restaurant: upon closer inspection, it looked like it was part of an ink tube from a ballpoint pen.

When I was cooking professionally, the chefs I worked for had rules that made a lot of sense. They prohibited waiters from using glass to scoop ice out of the ice maker. Imagine if the glass had broken, you'd never have found the clear, sharp shards among all the ice; the entire contents of the ice maker would have had to have been discarded.

One rule, which was frequently broken, was that cooks were not allowed to have drinking glasses at their work stations. If one had broken, the shards could have gone into the food. This rule is so ingrained that even now, when I'm cooking at home, I keep glasses away from the food preparation area.

It's a good idea to keep small, sharp objects out of the kitchen: if you have a notice board in there, buy the type that uses magnets rather than drawing pins. One chef at a Hong Kong restaurant learned the particular lesson the hard way (he was using the board to pin up receipts from suppliers). If your child is into arts and crafts, keep the artwork away from food, so glitter, beads and sequins can't find their way into a dish.

Not all foreign objects in food spell disaster. A few months ago, I was making a chocolate tart. After mixing the ingredients and putting the tart in the oven, I started washing dishes and discovered my plastic spatula had broken and was missing a chunk. There was only one place it could be: in the tart. I made a joke of it and told my friends as I served the tart that 'whoever finds the missing piece of spatula gets a prize!' (another slice of tart). I wouldn't have done that if I was still baking professionally.