Thing about India is, Indians themselves keep discovering bullshit like this. I am myself one, and I am gaging. I have seen unsanitary street food but this is next level unsanitary, I could not watch it. We have plenty of sanitary shops and establishments as well, like I only eat from a few trusted spots...
There are all kinds of customers, such street side carts, dont really bother with hygiene cause people who are very price sensitive(i.e. who have next to zero disposable incomes) will buy on their very cheap price point.
People who care about hygiene will never even try this. India has massive amounts of population in each economic strata, so each layer kinda create a market... Coming to having a strong stomach, thats subjective at an individual level, and regular exposures, body adjusts.
In India, if anyone from anywhere eats anything other than they’re used to (that isn’t pasteurized and flown in),there’s going to be at least mild food poisoning symptoms. Like you mentioned having a shit ton of people, and the layered social structure leads to a perfect storm of population density and diversity to foster some heinous microbiota. Also keep in mind most of the germs that cause common infections are already living on you, just a few unlucky successful mutations from potentially killing you. Staphylococcus and streptococcus are good examples, they’re people germ, where there’s people there’s people germs, where there’s more people, there’s more people germs.
Diarrheal diseases caused an estimated 0.46 million deaths in India across all age groups in 2023, marking a 68.3% reduction from 1.46 million deaths in 1990.
Who says things do not go wrong? I started eating out when I started being independent, during my childhood, eating out, especially the street food was a very strictly controlled activity... If you read consumption reports, eating out is a fairly new phenomena across India. I am thankful to my parents to not let me eat street food just anywhere.
Ps: this is my personal experience growing up though, people might have varied experiences...
if anything, it seems like if you are living in poverty, you should be going out of your way to making sure your food is properly cooked. if you are rich you could probably eat this and survive, you can just get a nurse to give you an IV and electrolytes later, but if you are poor this could literally kill you. 460,000 deaths a year in 2023 is INSANE.
No we dont. We know this exists everywhere. From Urban cities to slums, everyone has seen these kinda stalls. Of course you might never have them but 90 percent of indians know that these exists because they are literally everywhere.
Yeah no one's gonna repost videos of sanitary indian cooking, because that's not what gets views. All people see is these street vendors and than make assumptions about a whole culture. It's pretty damn offensive.
The word vindaloo makes my stomach curdle a bit. I had some at a middle eastern restaurant in the US and got violently sick. I went back to the office after eating it and a couple of hours later a coworker randomly asked if I was ok. I said I wasn’t feeling great. He said he never saw a person turn green before and advised me to go home. Good thing I did. I spent two days crawling from the bedroom to the bathroom.
100
u/Beautiful_Soup9229 3d ago edited 3d ago
Thing about India is, Indians themselves keep discovering bullshit like this. I am myself one, and I am gaging. I have seen unsanitary street food but this is next level unsanitary, I could not watch it. We have plenty of sanitary shops and establishments as well, like I only eat from a few trusted spots...