The Bacteria Made Me Do It!

So your body is made up of approximately 100 trillion cells. But it's also made up of ten times that many bacteria. So your basically like a walking petri dish, yum. Anywho, today we worked on a lot of cuts, pont nuef, batonnet, brunoise, ciseler, concasser, and of course, the famous julienne. Now I realize these mean nothing to you so I'll try to translate: steak fries, sliced bell pepper, minced, diced, minced tiny, and strips. That's a rough translation but basically that's kind of how things are. So, the worst thing about culinary arts school is working on cutting while smelling all the other classes cook amazing things and sitting there like staring. It's horrible. So now I'm going to tell you some weird interesting things you could live without knowing. First of all there is a dangerous infection called Listeriosis caused by eating the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. One of the symptoms of Listeriosis is miscarriage, THE SYMPTOM! WHAT?! HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK?! Also, never eat food from swollen cans cause it could be a sign of botulism. How many different cows are in a hamburger that you eat? A hundred? A thousand? Who knows? At a slaughter house thousands of cows are ground together and a little piece of each one makes up that burger that you ate. Yum. So I'll end on a funny note, my instructor Chef Ted ate a habanero once, then later that day he went out drinking with friends. The problem with peppers is that the heat from them can stay attached to your fingers for awhile, even after you wash your hands. So he was drinking so much that he tried to take his contacts out, and you can imagine what that was like (if you can't it was basically like macing yourself). But that's not even the good part! Because he was so drunk that night, the next morning he totally forgot, and he put them back in! Ouch!