When I first started working as a cook, I was instructed in no uncertain terms to only use whole bay leaves when cooking so that when the leaves were removed, still whole, one could be sure that no pieces had broken off and remained in the stew (or whatever).
I was told that eating dried bay leaves was akin to eating broken glass in their potential effects on the digestive system.
Yet, just the other day I was eating a rabbit pie and I discovered a whole bay leaf in it. I asked the server, and she said that it was common practice for that restaurant to leave bay leaves in situ.
I guess they can't be that bad for you if restaurants can serve them hidden in the middle of a pie?
Best Answer
There is no reason to worry. The worst thing which can happen is that a piece of bay leaf, being somewhat hard, can lodge somewhere in your digestive system, necessitating a trip to ER. But a medical paper on the topic starts its discussion section with the sentence "Reports discussing ingestion of bay leaves have been exceedingly scant". They only cite 10 references in the period 1950-1990, and most of these are general studies of foreign bodies in the esophagus, not specific studies of bay leaf ingestion.
Given how often bay leafs must find their ways into people's digestive systems (they feature in our food), it is safe to conclude that only a tiny fraction of ingested bay leafes cause problems, else there would be more studies mentioning such cases. The same is true for side effects different from mechanical obstruction: if this had happened, somebody would have published it.
The paper I mentioned is "Bay Leaf Impaction in the Esophagus and Hypopharynx" by Stephen K. Buto, MD; Tat-Kin Tsang, MD; Gerald W. Sielaff, MD; Laurie L. Gutstein, MD; and Mick S. Meiselman, MD. Sadly, it isn't freely available (I could read the full text because my uni has a subscription).
I guess that if you are working as a cook, your workplace may decide that even if the chance for a customer choking on a bay leaf is something like one in a million, they'd rather instill removing bay leaves from dishes as a policy. Probably prudent, although there are more important risks to care about.