What’s the point of food-safe gloves? You’re still touching everything. I don’t get it
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Gloves are to protect hands, not protect whatever your hands are touching.
Food safe gloves are gloves with special properties that mean they wont contaminate the food, are strong and they should also be a colour like blue, so that if they break and get into the food, its obvious.
So food safe is in comparison to say a medical glove which might have certain compounds, like latex or powders.
But its important to note this is a debate in kitchens with some encouraging the use of gloves and others thinking it doesn’t really help at all. They can make people think gloves are “cleaner” than hands when they aren’t.
Sounds like you’re ready for food service.
I had to fire a guy once for not wearing gloves. He protested daily that he did wear them, he wore some this morning!
Former restaurant cook and long-time home cook, for whatever my experience is worth.
I don’t cook in restaurant anymore, but back when I did we were actually discouraged from using gloves (there are always exceptions, like if you cut yourself you should probably cover that). The reason has been stated elsewhere in the thread: false sense of security. People don’t change their gloves as often as they wash their hands.
At home, I still like to have food safe gloves available but the reasons have reversed. In food service, it’s to keep you out of the food. But at home, it’s more that I’m trying to keep the food off of me! Making burgers? Gloves keep the meat from getting jammed up under my fingernails. Tossing potatoes in oil? Gloves keep me getting greasy. I do experience dermatitis on my fingers, so by using the gloves for messy cooking I can reduce my skin’s exposure to things that irritate it too.
Your hands are covered in germs. You don’t want those germs on the food, so you put gloves on, which aren’t covered in germs (hopefully).
Germs generally cannot pass through the glove from your hand to the food.
If you touch something else like a doorknob, then touch the food, you’re not using them correctly. The gloves are meant to be touching ONLY the food. The procedure has to be designed so that touching the food all happens at once, with clean gloves, or the gloves are changed for new ones when you do have to touch something else.
I’m hoping you don’t prepare food for a living. If you do, someone failed to train you properly.
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