 Remember that 24-hour flu you had last year? Well, there's no such thing as a 24- or 48-hour flu. There's no such thing as stomach flu. What you had was likely food poisoning. When someone gets hepatitis from eating a strawberry, the hepatitis didn't come from the strawberry. They don't even have little livers. As Dr. McDougal likes to point out, when's the last time we heard of someone getting Dutch Elm disease, or a bad case of aphid? Food poisoning comes from animals, specifically animal feces, and that manure runoff can contaminate sprout seeds, spinach, and other healthy plant foods. Still, that's better than eating the manure directly. Animal products, particularly fish and poultry, can be covered in fecal bacteria. It's so bad that, while the federal government recommends we wash our fruits and veggies, we're not even supposed to rinse meat and poultry for fear of the viral and bacterial splatter. Chicken carcasses, so covered in fecal matter that researchers at the University of Arizona found more fecal bacteria in the kitchen, on sponges, dish towels, and in sink drain, than they found swabbing the toilet. Even after bleaching everything twice in a meat eater's house, it is safer to lick the rim of the toilet seat than the kitchen countertop, because people aren't preparing chickens in their toilets. Frankly, you know that chicken juice isn't juice, it's essentially raw fecal soup. And in terms of a fish hygiene, researchers swapped sushi for fecal bacteria. The national food standards guidelines for maximum fecal bacteria on ready-to-eat food items is 30,000. Okay, well this is what they found. They also swabbed vegetarian sushi, avocado and cucumber rolls, and found zero, contamination zero, fecal bacteria. Unlike salmon and tuna, avocados and cucumbers don't have rectums.