Why You Might Think Twice Before Ordering Lemon Water at Restaurants

There’s something refreshing about ordering a glass of ice-cold water with a bright little lemon wedge floating on top.

It looks clean. It smells fresh. And after a salty meal, that little squeeze of citrus can make plain water taste so much better.

But have you ever wondered how that lemon actually made its way onto your glass?

That seemingly innocent garnish has occasionally been the subject of food-safety studies, and some findings are enough to make you look at restaurant lemon wedges a little differently.

Before you swear off lemon water forever, though, there’s an important bit of context.

The presence of bacteria on some restaurant lemon samples does not mean that every lemon wedge is contaminated or that ordering lemon water will make you sick. Food handling practices vary enormously between restaurants, and finding microorganisms on a food surface is not the same as proving that a person will become ill from eating it.

Still, the research raises an interesting question:

How clean is that lemon sitting on the rim of your glass?

Why Restaurant Lemon Wedges Have Been Studied

A frequently cited study published in the Journal of Environmental Health examined lemon slices collected from restaurants and reported microbial contamination on many of the samples tested.

The study is often repeated online with increasingly alarming headlines, but the original findings need to be kept in context. A relatively small sample of lemons from a group of restaurants cannot tell us that restaurant lemons everywhere are contaminated.

What it does demonstrate is that ready-to-eat garnishes can potentially become contaminated during handling.

That matters because lemons placed directly into beverages are generally eaten or allowed to contact the drink without another cooking step that would reduce microorganisms.