"GI tract?!" Again, your mouth is as much a part of your respiratory tract as your nose, which is why we cover BOTH with a mask. How do you think food gets to your GI tract?
"Infected food?!" You mean contaminated food.
...and, yes, of course you can get it from your food, since droplets would enter your mouth (again, part of your respiratory tract) before anything goes into your stomach.
I wasn't exactly eating his straw, though I was getting his saliva and respiratory droplets deposited directly into my respiratory tract while attempting to consume a beverage. Whether or not you can get infected in your stomach is inconsequential since your food doesn't teleport into your stomach. It passes through your mouth and throat, which are obviously part of your respiratory tract.
What does bleeding in your mouth have to do with anything? Even if it can also be transmitted through blood, that wouldn't mean you have to have a cut in your mouth since your mouth is already one of the primary pathways to infection.
Everyone knows that you can get pretty much any respiratory imfection through your eyes, nose, or mouth, since it's all connected. That includes influenza viruses, rinoviruses, and, yes, coronaviruses.
SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 target the same ACE2 receptor used in epithelial cells lining the airway. Here's a good old article about it from 16 years ago:
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is an acute infectious disease that spreads mainly via the respiratory route. A distinct coronavirus (SARS‐CoV) has been identified as the aetiological agent of SARS. Recently, a metallopeptidase named ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
We know it infects the upper respiratory tract (mouth, nose, etc) as readily as the lower respiratory tract (lungs, bronchial tubes, etc) since anosmia comes from COVID-19 infection in your sinues.
I love how you confidently claim there isn't a single case of someone getting the virus from contaminated food when China went into a second lockdown and blocked imports over supposedly-contaminated salmon. Millions of people directly affected after they found a contaminated chopping board. I think they wanted to blame it on imported salmon since they didn't want to admit that the virus was still spreading domestically and preferred to blame it on imported cases, but it doesn't matter whether the food was contaminated from outside the country or inside: It was still contaminated.
Were the people in your "real world example" licking 1,200 utensils moments before the 1,200 served ate with the same utensils without washing them? No? Then I fail to see the relevance. Even when considering inevitable surface contamination, since food is also a surface, there's also this little thing called "viral load" to consider. Swappong saliva with an infected person is many orders of magnitude worse than eating a salad that an infected person breathed over.