Olives - love them or hate them?

We mostly get them in tins or jars, but there's a Lebanese store (mysteriously called "The Little Arab") that sells them loose.There's nothing I like more than a loose
..olive, so every 3 or 4 months I go there and stock up on kalamatas, Lebanese cracked olives, a spicy version they have and dried olives.
Yeah, we have a few middle eastern stores around here and an Italian market that all sell loose olives and loose feta packed in brine (in addition to a lot of other delicious looking foods behind the glass case). I'm not sure if I liked dried olives, never tried them, but kalamatas are one of my favorite olives.
 
They don’t tend to come in glass jars here, usually tins, vacuum sealed packets but mostly in the refrigerated section in see through tubs.
We do have the vacuum sealed packets (snacking size) but not seen a lot (any? I wasn't looking for them) in the refrigerated section in tubs--I've seen some fancy pickles there, though.
 
My inner infection control nurse struggles with the whole loose olives thing.
Paging JAS_OH1 back up needed 😂
I think it's knowing the bacteria deterrents in the brine, and also seeing how clean these particular stores are kept, the observance of associates using food prep gloves, etc. that makes me feel safer. I am less happy about my DH sticking his bare hands in the ice bin in the lower freezer to get an ice cube than I am about consuming loose olives, LOL. But honestly, he is the bigger olive consumer between the two of us, so the majority of loose olives I purchase are for him. I like my kalamata olives and feta on Greek style pizzas, so the heat is an extra layer of security.
 
We mostly get them in tins or jars, but there's a Lebanese store (mysteriously called "The Little Arab") that sells them loose.There's nothing I like more than a loose
..olive, so every 3 or 4 months I go there and stock up on kalamatas, Lebanese cracked olives, a spicy version they have and dried olives.
They've got loose ones at Kroger and Publix I think but they're like $8 or $12 a lb. 😤
 
The thing is, I want only employees to have access to these loose food products. I saw a guy once sticking his bare hands in the soup cauldron and getting a taste on his fingers and licking it, then doing the same with the next pot of soup. And nevermind kids grabbing food out of accessible containers at those bars. Which is why buffets are out of the question for me. At resorts in Mexico where they had any buffets I just stayed drunk.
 
The thing is, I want only employees to have access to these loose food products. I saw a guy once sticking his bare hands in the soup cauldron and getting a taste on his fingers and licking it, then doing the same with the next pot of soup. And nevermind kids grabbing food out of accessible containers at those bars. Which is why buffets are out of the question for me. At resorts in Mexico where they had any buffets I just stayed drunk.
I could tell you a story about a runny nose and open food bins... 😁
 
I love Castelvetrano/Sicilian olives with their buttery/salty taste to me at least. I had a bad habit, given salt amount, of eating them and thin slices of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese as a snack daily for a while.

As to buffets, we were staying in a hotel across the street from a convention center where we were vending when we still bred Emerald Tree Boas. One guy was filling his plate, along with several guys that were together and were a bit drunk as they had gone directly from the show to the bar. He didn't do anything physically gross that I saw, but very loudly announced to the guys he was with that he didn't know why he was going to eat the corn kernels he was shoveling on his plate because they would look exactly the same when they came out (except he used a bit more descriptive language), again, very, very loudly, as in we were across the large dining room and heard him quite clearly, and I bet Craig that the next dining room over also heard him. Fortunately, we weren't eating the buffet, nor anything with corn.
 
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