Kebabs are bad for you - apparently

Scientists have revealed some startling new information. It’s being claimed as one of the breakthroughs of the decade, if not the century. Whisper it quietly, but it appears the good-old donner kebab might actually be doing us harm:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/05/kebab-takeaways-food-safety

I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but a study carried out by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has found that 4.7% of salads and sauces served at kebab takeaways contain “unsatisfactory” levels of bacteria, and that 0.4% contain “unacceptable or potentially hazardous” levels, meaning the mouth-watering delights were, contrary to appearance, unfit for human consumption!

I’m sure donner-philes across the nation are finding this news almost as difficult to digest as yesterday’s dinner. Can the humble kebab, a staple of al fresco dining from Grimsby to Croydon, really be a threat to public health?

Of course it is you bone heads! How many hours and thousands of pounds have been wasted in “discovering” what my mottled toilet bowl could attest after one of my ill-advised but thankfully rare moonlit drop-ins to the local germ emporium?

I don’t think it will come as a shock to anyone who has ever been inside a kebab shop that they are, more often than not, a picture book of poor hygiene.

It is not surprising in the slightest that they operate like an oversized bacterial incubator, lovingly nurturing their microscopic clientele on a feast of heat-regulated chilli sauce, “fresh” salad and fine cuts of reconstituted meat of indeterminate origin.

The problem is, people who frequent kebab shops are not the greatest exponents of good judgement at the best of times. Even without added microbes, donner kebab remains a questionable dinner choice.

The vast majority of us only succumb to the temptation when we are hungry late at night and nothing else is open and our rational faculties have been eroded by similarly ill-advised levels of alcohol.

Indeed, we never seem to heed the health warnings relating to alcohol consumption so the chances of us ditching our drunken donner or burger or fried chicken for rye bread and organic hummus is fairly close to zero.

The point of the study is clearly to initiate a clampdown on the peddlers of poor hygiene, which is no doubt a good thing; I’m just not sure it will mean that much to the people it actually affects.