You don’t know they haven’t just washed their hands. In fact, since they’re about to eat, it’s likely they did.

You have a lot more faith in people's hygiene than you should.

An alarming number of people routinely don't wash their hands even when they really, REALLY should. Stomach flu for example is almost solely transmitted by people who touch something with contaminated faeces on it, then bring their hand to their mouth. And that something is usually a bathroom door handle.

Judging by how common stomach flu is, it's statistically safer to assume nobody washes hands. But even if 99.9% did, all it takes is one idiot coming out of the bathroom and using the soy sauce dispenser to ruin your week.

As for restaurant staff "cleaning" things, I've seen more cleaners using dirty rags to spread dirt around and make surfaces look clean than actually cleaning anything. Even in my company, I refuse to let the cleaning lady in, because each time she comes, she uses the same rag she used in the bathroom to wipe my desk.

The kind of person who fingers public food dispensers is exactly the person I would expect to skip hand hygiene.

People are such fucking germaphobes now days I don't know how they function without having a nervous breakdown. Somehow, in 150 years we went from not quite believing the germ theory of disease to thinking everything is going to sicken us. I'm absolutely filthy to those people and guess who never gets sick. They'd die in our house. My wife often leaves her dinner on the stove or covered on the table and eats it for lunch or dinner the next night.

It's not that. It's that I don't wander around the world thinking of every possible disgusting thing that may have happened to the food going in my mouth.

And get fucked BTW. I isolated, masked and got vaxxed. COVID killed my mother.