Could you use this utensil again?

[Fink]

If you found someone in your household using kitchen tongs (usually used for the barbecue) to pick up snails in the garden to move them off the plants. Owing to the cack-handedness of the tong-wielder, some snails got crushed in the process.

I've sat them in undiluted bleach, covered them in boiling water, scrubbed with a pot scourer, and put them through the dishwasher ... but I'm not sure anything is going to wash away the memory of squished snail.

Would you use those tongs again or is it time to invest in separate kitchen and snail-removing tongs?

Well, I move snails with my hands so yes, I would.

So you are happy for the tongs to touch dead cow but not dead snail 🐌 the double standards!!! 😂 the tongs are clean now don't worry, tong away.

They must be the cleanest tongs in the entire country by now OP. Yes, I'd use them again.

Of course. I would pick a snail up with my hands though and would have just bunged them in the dishwasher rather than fannying about with bleach solution etc, so I suspect we are quite different people.

Good grief. What's wrong with touching snails? Do you eat meat?

I’d have just shoved them in the dishwasher. Maybe washed by hand if I happened to have a sink of water on the go but I certainly wouldn’t have bothered with anything more than one of those two options. I don’t even regularly steep the nappy bucket in bleach- hot soapy water and a good scrub is more than adequate!

I'd be more worried about using them covered in bleach....

Bleach is totally OTT

Dishwasher would have done it for me!

Mucky1 I'll happily eat most mammals and birds, but even when I lived in France I could never being myself to eat snails.

I think part of the distaste comes from the fact that the snails were dispatched by the tongs. I don't (usually) kill cows with my tongs, I buy them pre-dead.

As for putting them in bleach first, they were delivered to me with pieces of snail still attached. I don't want snail corpse hanging around my dishwasher.

As it happens, I have removed snails by hand in the past. I was not the tong-user tonight.

If I found that someone had used tongs to move snails instead of picking them up by hand, I'd currently be trying to decide whether that was more or less ridiculous than your bleaching, scrubbing and dishwashering ritual. WHy not go the whole hog and burn the dishwasher?

You do know that garden snails are edible?

I eat fruit and veg from the garden touched by snails, sometimes without washing it. I thought you were going to say they'd been used to fish out an unflushable jobby. That would warrant your question.

Today I gave my kitchen tongs to 1yo DTs to make them shut the hell up amuse them.

DT2 offered them to DT1, who carefully and thoughtfully pulled a big stretchy piece of snot out of his nose and rubbed them on the tongs.

We are still using them.

I could cope with snot much more easily than snail carcass!

I'm glad I didn't post in AIBU because the answer would have been abundantly clear! I'll go ahead and tong away then. Thanks all for helping me to put my snails in perspective.

Better go now and hang out the washing- yes, it will get darked on, but I don't care. Maybe the remaining snails will even come up to slime all over it. Double standards.

TBH I've happily eaten beautifully prepared snails in France but would be totally grossed out by tongs tainted by newly (accidentally) crushed snails. I've previous for throwing out into the garden a spatula I found with a slug crawling on it in my kitchen. Please don't judge, my kitchen is clean but my house has a damp cellar beneath it and they found a way in

Yes, I would! But I've been hardened after DH and I used a tea strainer which, unbeknownst to us, had been used by SIL to fish then 2-year-old DN's errant poo out of the bath the night before and left out on the side.

SIL maintained that she had cleaned it very, very well and that it was left on the side so MIL could decide whether to keep it or not. By sheer coincidence, DH and I had just bought some loose leaf tea we wanted to try. As we'd been speaking about the tea previously, we thought MIL had put the strainer out for us. We could not have been further from the truth.

We both survived and tea strainer is still in use.

Aww, poor snails!

Meh! I’ve eaten snails, totally agree with with the “happy to touch dead cow, but not dead snail” comment.