I didn't know why, but I knew that if you left potato salad out of the refrigerator too long, and especially if you left it in the sun, you would be sorry you ate it.
Kids are impressionable.
To this day, before I stick my fork into a mound of anybody's potato salad, I wonder where it's been. That's not all I wonder about when it's time to eat. I wonder who's touched my strawberries and whether they washed their hands after they used the bathroom, if they had one to use. I wonder whether runoff from pig or cattle farms has contaminated my asparagus. I wonder if the lovely sauteed chicken breast on my plate once belonged to a hen infected with salmonella.