Spring Alert: Avoid a Picnic Purge.

by Mandy Del Vecchio

We are coming into picnic season and isn’t it the most fabulous thing to sit on lovely fresh cut lawn, with a glass of something nose-tingling, gossiping and giggling with your favourite people… grazing on the most delectable nosh?

Now wait there a minute, let me interrupt your dining to announce a not-so-fabulous reminder: food poisoning! Poisoning – sounds dramatic I know. Well, if you have suffered from it recently as I have, you will remember it as being exactly that, dramatic!

The 24 hours on the bathroom floor. The cramping in your stomach that feels like some dirty troll has forced his fist down your throat and is punching you square in the guts – from the inside. The feeling that ‘this may actually be the death of me’, as you cry out and heave, wondering ‘what the hell was that orange thing in my tummy?’ See? Dramatic!

I am not trying to scare you all, nor am I trying to make you sick, as a somewhat displaced revenge plot. I am simply trying to help you – in the hope that your summer will not be ruined by the trauma and the violence of the bad oyster oracle or the goat’s cheese ghoul. I am saving you from a dining disaster!

You see the myth that food poisoning only occurs when travelling in third world countries – 'get it India, come straight outia'; dining out at a food court – 'bain marie belly', or in some kind of bad kitchen nightmare – 'uncooked chicken lickin', is just that, a myth.

I am here to tell you; food poisoning can occur anywhere. It is not narrowed down to the obvious ‘risky eating’ venues we are all led to believe. Food poisoning can come from the most unlikely places, that is, if you are not savvy on your serving.

The Victorian website Better Health Channel has an article that will help you for the next time you are planning your fabulous picnic or BBQ, to ensure that the only cleaning up you are doing afterwards are crumbs – and not off the bathroom floor.

So, you must be curious to know what it was that got me. The little nasty that brought me to my knees, in the most un-glamorous Sunday I have endured in years. I can't be absolutely certain, but the likely culprit was Hollandaise sauce – uncooked egg, sitting too long, at room temperature, on a thirty-degree day. Ah, that old chestnut.

**The only upside to my 24 hour purging nightmare – A huge Breaking Bad fan, I was stoked to wake up after my ordeal and have a legitimate reason to exclaim,
‘Gatorade me, b*tch!’