What’s the point of food-safe gloves? You’re still touching everything. I don’t get it
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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.
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