Someone touched all the toppings on the sandwiches as well, catering knows how to avoid poisoning the talent and crew.
When a request is super specific, weird, and hard to fill, it usually gets pushed back on, at least in my world.
My understanding of the "check" is that you get a call from the person advancing the show to ask about the strange demand, not that you verify compliance.
If the M&Ms are devoid of brown ones, you don't eat them because you know some peon was told to go through the bowl and take them out, and that sort of person will eat the brown ones and then go back in with their bare fingers for the next one, and thoroughly stir their fingers into the bowl looking for the last brown ones.
Now, if the M&Ms are carefully laid out in a series of monochromatic bowls, with no brown bowl in sight, it's probably safe to eat them because what sort of maniac would do that sorting without aid of a knife or spatula or something, right? But you shouldn't eat them because that's a work of art.
Did latex gloves not exist in the 80s?
Actually, come to think of it, it's possible one could simply order pre-sorted M&Ms directly from the factory if one were buying in enough bulk.
Amusingly the UK version does not offer brown ones.
Yes. As did plain old (but effective) soap and water!
This would be normal for M&Ms that were just dumped into a bowl, too -- you can't eat from the bowl without touching the other M&Ms.
> This principle is named after a rock band (Van Halen), who had a “brown M&M’s clause” in their contracts with event organizers, stipulating that the organizers must provide M&M’s in the backstage area, but that there must be no brown M&M’s available. This small clause gave the band an easy way to check whether organizers actually paid attention to all the details in the contract, which was important given how complicated and potentially dangerous the band’s production was.
Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms.