Salad bars are breeding grounds for all sort of food-borne illnesses and allergies. Too many salad bars don't keep warm foods hot enough or cold foods cold enough. Cross-contamination of foods at a salad bar is commonplace, so anyone with a gluten allergy (just to mention one) has to be very careful. I've been to far too many restaurants where the people stocking the salad bar know very little about what each item contains, many of them come straight out of a carton, jar or can. (One of our pet peeves is places that don't know that ranch dressing contains garlic.)
The reason garlic is considered 'healthy', as I wrote in my first blog post last spring, is that it slows down your digestion. That means you absorb less of the food and what you do absorb is broken down into things your body can handle better.
That's great unless, like my wife and perhaps another 2-3 % of the population, your body's reaction to garlic is to basically shut your digestive system down completely for several hours.
The FDA and USDA don't recognize garlic allergy as a food issue yet, but 30-40 years ago they didn't recognize gluten allergy issues, either, so there's still hope.
In many restaurants, they use jars of pre-minced garlic, which may contain preservatives. These days there are limitations on what preservatives can be used on salad bar items, but I suspect many restaurants make their own 'preservatives' that ignore those limitations.
