Gloves can actually be less sanitary.
How so?
I think there was a study that confirmed it too. The main factor being you’re more likely to feel and wash a soiled hand than change a soiled glove.
Hands sweat so you get moist and closed environment perfect for bacteria growth. Any chef that had to wear gloves at work will tell you they had issues with nail infections and similar.
I’d rather they have a hand-washing policy that is not only ruthless but also ruthlessly enforced.
If people are doing proper hand hygiene, then you need not worry.
True. Chef in a restaurant? No problem.
But expecting minimum wage workers doing mindnumbing factory work to do that perfectly every time and never cut corners without significant oversight seems… unlikely.
Also let’s think about why they’re not wearing gloves. Do you think it’s for any reason other than cost cutting?
Minimum wage workers doing mind numbing factory work also do dumb shit wearing gloves like scratch their face or tie their shoes, regularly.
Source: was a floor manager during covid.
Yeah but… remove your gloves before leaving shop floor, put on gloves when entering shop floor is much easier to enforce than “did you wash your hands” - you can catch them blue handed (or not blue handed, as the case may be).
If they glove up then scratch their face, those gloves are now contaminated.
Gloves are only good practice if you can lay in all the surrounding good practices and if you can do that then you can probably sort out good hand washing practice and the real world difference outside of a clean room or surgical theater is pretty much negligible.
But if you don’t glove up and scratch your face, your fingers are contaminated too.
There are a LOT of minimum wage workers in restaurants too. You say “chef” and it conjures images of some fancy restaurant. But why is a fancy chef more able to wash his hands than a fast food employee? It’s not a high art.
I think expecting every food worker to wear gloves is silly and unnecessary. And assuming it’s just cheaping out when they don’t wear gloves… wow that’s just crazy talk IMO. Have you ever worked food service?
Not wearing gloves could be a tactile thing. I wear gloves when cleanup would be a real hassle without them (wood finishing, working with epoxies), but I prefer not to when possible because I can’t feel what I’m doing as well.
I mean yeah same, but shoving a fistful of cheese onto a slice of bread 4000 times? Not quite the same!
Peeling a slice of cheese off a brick of them in fact involves some touch sense.
As long as it’s not a TV chef, they think they have magic rags and aprons.
They’re making sandwiches, not scrubbing in for surgery.
Do you fully scrub your hands every time you prepare food? Every time you open a packet of crisps, every time you eat a cookie? Or is just food that’s been touched by stupid poor people that you don’t want to eat?
You sound like you need to get over yourself.
More dangerous to use gloves with some types of machinery. For instance, you will never see a machinist or toolmaker use gloves when operating a lathe or mill.
Also do chefs wear gloves? Usually in only specific situations.
Clean hands might look gross but aren’t necessarily unsanitary.
I’ve worked with food for long shifts before.
Your hands sweat. If you wear waterproof gloves for just a few minutes, they start to fill with sweat! This is fine for a few minutes but after a few hours your skin will be horrible, after a few days it will be horrific with your hands red raw and large chunks of your skin rubbing off easily.
Think about what your hand looks like after ten minutes in the bath, now imagine they are in a bath filled with your own sweat for 8 hours a day five days a week for month after month.
For anyone who has had to wear “hygienic” gloves for prolonged periods, it is obvious why you would not want your food preppers wearing them all day, unless you want your sandwich made by sickly sweaty hands that are constantly shedding skin and sweat at the wrists.
The people in this thread who don’t want their sandwich touched by a dirty poor person that is too unreliable to wash their own hands need to take a good look at themselves. Realise that maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about, have a little faith in your fellow man and get out of your arse!
If you don’t want someone with bare, clean hands touching your food, don’t ever go to a restaurant. I worked in a kitchen for 5 years and wearing gloves is rare, it’s for cutting hot peppers, etc. But when you’re making meals, you just wash your hands and cook.
Whenever I see a sandwich factory my mind automatically goes to Freddy Got Fingered
If I’ve learned one thing from this thread it’s that gloves give some people a highly exaggerated sense of cleanliness. For that perception, we are tossing bajillions of plastic gloves into landfills daily.
Actually gloves are a bigger problem. In them your hands start to sweat immediately and prolonged use is ideal fertile ground for bacteria. With proper hygiene pure hands is safer and not a problem. I’d also assume all product is later sterilized with radiation to be extra safe.
Nothing mores appetising than ham being described as a “log”
😂😂
