The concept of “things with a threatening aura” has crept up in internet culture lately, in many ways coinciding with a growing interest in the macabre and creepy. It could also be that, finally, someone managed to capture that specific sort of fear and confusion that certain things bring out without a clear cause. 

Of course, what is actually “cursed” is the number of deaths caused by food safety regulations being ignored. While it can happen in a nice, popular upscale restaurant, it stands to reason that a place that can’t even get its own sign right will struggle with keeping your food separate from the floor. 

More precisely, over half a billion people get sick from foodborne illnesses every year, of which nearly half a million end up dying. To cut restaurants some slack, not all of these happen in eateries, often stores and even household kitchens don’t live up to the necessary safety standards. 

However, unless you are pretty unlucky or dangerously careless, chances are, most of the times you have encountered food poisoning have been from a restaurant, not home cooking. Despite the fact that food safety guidelines exist, there are significantly more eateries than there are people to raid them. 

Open up Google Maps or whatever your local map service is and just take a look at the number of bars, restaurants, cafes, and other eating establishments in your general vicinity. Chances are, unless you live in a particularly rural area, there would be more than you can shake a stick at. Checking and rechecking them all might be beyond an often smallish governmental service. 

Remember, food safety inspectors aren’t just poking around your local watering hole, they also need to look into logistics centers, slaughterhouses, stores, packaging plants, farms, and really any other location that touches the food industry. Which, when you sit down to think about it, is most of them. 

Despite the fact that so much of what we eat can kill us (talk about a threatening aura) it would appear that governments around the world sort of believed in an honor system for the longest time. For example, eggs, which smell like literal sulfur when they go bad, were only routinely inspected from 1970 onwards in the US. 

The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), in its current form, only came into existence in 1981, although there had been a similar agency just four years earlier. So every time you see film or TV characters in an old diner during something set in the 60s, just remember that the most abject horror could have been going on in the kitchen. 

So perhaps listen to your instincts and do your best to listen to your gut, pun absolutely intended, when it comes to restaurants with threatening auras. While certain red flags might indicate that the food will be good (taste-wise, not in terms of your gut health,) common sense is still of paramount importance.