What’s the point of food-safe gloves? You’re still touching everything. I don’t get it
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> You’re still touching everything.
1. Not directly with your bacteria-ridden fleshy stalks you call fingers.
2. Not with some material that gives people allergic reactions or extra tickets for the cancer lottery if they eat the food it touches.
You’re supposed to change glove after touching something dirty, sometimes even if you haven’t, like between customer orders.
People are lazy or don’t understand, though, and will handle something nasty like money, then go make a sandwich with the same gloves.
In theory, you change your gloves when you touch something gross, or every so often. And in practice, sometimes that even happens!
In reality, the truth is that gloves aren’t THAT useful most of the time.
– They are useful when the worker is sick, because they prevent any bacteria on the skin from transferring to the food or utensils, but A) so does washing your hands often, and B) if you are sick you shouldn’t be handling food for others to begin with.
– They are useful when the employee is injured, for the same reason as the above. Here they have actual use, because no amount of handwashing makes you want a bandage – or worse, what’s underneath it – to make contact with your food.
– They can protect workers’ hands from food. If you are handling acidic foods like pickles in juice, accidentally getting pickle juice on your hand every now and then can irritate your skin.
The big problem with gloves, however, is that they can create the *illusion* of safety. A worker who isn’t changing gloves often enough is creating a *more* dangerous situation than one who doesn’t wear gloves at all but frequently washes their hands. It looks safer to the customers, but it’s food safety theater. Does that mean you shouldn’t wear gloves when preparing food commercially? Of course not – your boss will fire you if you don’t – but do so responsibly.
So, the nice thing about gloves is that you can take them on and replace them with new gloves. So, say for example I’m cutting a chicken that’s raw. I don’t want to get raw chicken on a salad I’m preparing so I just remove the gloves and put on a fresh pair and go work on a salad (You’d still want to wash your hands when you’re doing this but this is an example). This reduces the chances of cross contamination immensely. There’s also the chance that you’re working with something that can get corrosive to your hands over long periods of time (like an acid or extremely spicy food) and the gloves will act as a barrier to protect your hands. They won’t do it all, of course (like I said, you still want to wash your hands regardless) but it just cuts the chances of risk down immensely.
If you walk into a kitchen, wash your hands, and then start working, you’ll carry whatever you failed to wash off your hands (which will always be something; surgeons wash their hands and forearms for like five minutes with consistent and detailed scrubbing to try and eliminate germs), and whatever you pick up along the way.
If you walk in and put on gloves, you’ll only have what you pick up along the way (which will be pretty minimal because food safety procedures will already minimise things).
Also, gloves are a psychological shortcut to make you more careful about outside contaminants. It’s super easy to do something like wipe the sweat of your brow off with the back of your wrist, it’s a basic human instinct, and you’ll think nothing of it. But if you’re wearing gloves, you might well catch yourself before doing it and realise “this doesn’t feel right, why? Oh, I’m gloved I shouldn’t do this”, or afterwards you’ll wipe your forehead and it’ll feel wrong, and you’ll become aware that you did it, in a way you might not if you just instinctively brushed your forehead.
Thus you’ll be prompted to clean up again, and eventually a habit will form.
Some people say that you should change your gloves every time you touch something new. And some people say that gloves are the worst and you should just wash your hands every time you touch something new.
The best solution is actually somewhere in the middle (Surprising.. I know).
In a kitchen your primary goal is to prevent the bad things that are contained in food, from getting into the final dish, and thus consumed by your guests/friends.
Most of these come into the kitchen along side your meat, but this is not always the case. You could wash your hands with industrial strength anti-bacterial soap every time you handle meat, but everyone who lived through COVID, will tell you that this level of washing can actually cause significant irritation of your hands, especially if you are doing it every day for the rest of your career.
Ideally, you use gloves when handing meat, and once you are done handling meat, you take off the gloves, and wash down your workstation. At this point you can decide if you want to put a new pair of gloves on to work with veggies and cooked meat, but since these are much less of a danger, it is acceptable to only wash your hands with a normal hand soap between dishes.
A kitchens desire to go through thousands of pairs of gloves extra, or hundreds of litres of soap, is up to the owners and the culture. But either tends to solve the same problem.
One thing I will note. That if you are dealing with inexperienced people in a kitchen setting, I will generally suggest that they go the route of washing their hands between dishes, instead of wearing gloves and changing them often.
Because it is immediately obvious when you have touched something and have residue on your hands. But it can take some time for someone to get into the habit of changing gloves, and it is easy for someone to accidentally handle some meat, and then go make a salad, not realizing that their glove is still dangerous. Its easier to feel the slimness of the meat on your hands.
the goal is you don’t want your skin touching the food because it has oils and bacteria and the like, and food-safe gloves are not likely to react or leave behind any sort of residue when they touch food.
these gloves in theory are supposed to be regularly changed out in between touching other stuff, such as if the person prepping the food then has to handle trash or a cash register, and they can get in serious trouble if a health inspector notices they don’t
Gloves are a physical barrier between a stranger’s skin and the food you consume.
Properly wearing gloves starts with thoroughly washing and drying your hands. Then, you put on a clean pair of single use gloves.
In theory, the gloves are worn when handling “ready to eat foods,” meaning they aren’t going to be cooked before being served. Clean gloves touching food is “safe” compared to washed skin, which can harbor bacteria and viruses even after being washed.
Gloves are good for a limited time. Usually, they are required to be changed every hour, or whenever they are used to touch raw foods or come into contact with an unsanitized item.
There are literally hundreds of reasons that you need to change gloves, but each time a new pair is put on, you need to wash and dry your hands first.
It is time consuming, expensive, and really impractical during busy times in a restaurant. However, it provides an important safeguard when serving food to the public.
I was drunk going home from penn Station in NYC late at night.
Stopped by the pizza shop in the station and had to piss.
I noticed a pizza employee walk into the bathroom right before me and he had his plastic gloves on. He finished first, but not by much, and he did not wash his hands.
I followed him out…. He went straight to the serving line and did not change his gloves and started serving pizza slices.
I did not have pizza that night and went home hungry on my 55 minute train ride.
I never went back to that pizza place again.
*”You’re still touching everything”*
Well, that’s the problem. Folks in foodservice often don’t get the training they’re supposed to have with proper handling. For example, I’ve seen foodservice workers handle food, then a credit card, then food again. Disgusting!
[Food-safe gloves](https://hourglass-intl.com/are-these-gloves-food-safe/) are supposed to be able to contact food without transferring tastes, smells, and chemicals to the food. If used properly, the worker will only touch food and safe surfaces while preparing/serving food. Then if they touch a dirty surface, they are supposed to take them off (properly) and put on new ones.
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