Bleach Everything After Watching This Man Eat Directly from a Grocery Store Soup Bar

I spend an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through the r/trashy subreddit, because it makes me feel better about my own questionable life decisions. Yeah, sure, I might’ve minored in theatre, but at least I don’t make trick-or-treaters pay for their candy and I’ve never been caught photographing my genitals in public.

At least once a day, though, there’s something so wrong, upsetting, or just 100-percent fucked up that I close the app and swear that I’m done with Reddit and I’m going to spend my time reading, like, the National Geographic Almanac or whatever instead. That’s what I promised myself after seeing this video of a grown man drinking from the giant ladle at a grocery store’s hot bar, then putting it RIGHT BACK INTO THE POT OF SOUP.

That deeply disturbing clip was originally posted in r/WTF, with the title “Something to think about the next time you eat at the salad bar.” (Seriously?! I have thought about this at every meal, everywhere). According to the person who filmed it, the man had sampled at least two flavors of soup before he was stopped by the store’s security guard.

The video was reposted in a number of other subreddits and also made its way to Twitter; regardless of the platform, it was met with head shakes, dry heaves… and a lot of other reminders why none of us should ever eat from buffets, in public, or consume any foodstuffs that we didn’t purchase, unwrap, and prepare for ourselves.

“I worked at a hot bar for a couple years. One time a guy dropped the serving spoon, so I said I would bring a new one quickly,” one Redditor responded. “Seriously into the kitchen and back in about 12 seconds, and the fucking guy was using his car keys to scrape food onto his plate. It was chana masala.”

Another said he’d seen a man “lick the carving knife used for the roast beef” at his local bar’s Friday night happy hour. And a third casually mentioned that she’d watched a man pick up olives from a salad bar, smell them, and then decide whether he’d put them in his salad or just drop them back into the serving area. “[He] never smelled any of the ones he decided to keep, just the ones he was putting back,” she wrote.

The store hasn’t been officially-officially identified, but several Mariano’s shoppers suggested that it looked like one of that grocery chain’s locations. “We make an effort every day to provide our customers with the freshest, high quality foods,” Mariano’s responded on Twitter. “We are monitoring the safety and quality of our products and services to ensure we are living up to that promise. Thank you so much for the feedback.” (MUNCHIES has reached out to Mariano’s for comment but has not yet received a response.)

There’s no going back from this. There’s no recourse. All we can do is, like, not eat from the grocery store’s communal soup pot, and hope against hope that this jogger-wearing, ladle-licking, Typhoid Murray-looking jackhole burned the shit out of his mouth.