Wouldn’t it be great if we could all show up at our first day of a new job as a 20-year-old and help create rock greatness – Honky Tonk Women.

Instead, most are told to wear gloves while participating in sandwich greatness something.
But in Oregon, they’ve decided to rethink the gloves thing.

Eatocracy reports that the no-bare-hands rule was originally supposed to go into effect on July 1, but Oregon public health officials delayed the decision because of public debate that these new safety rules were not actually safe.

The rule would have prohibited food handlers from contacting “exposed, ready-to-eat food” with their bare hands. Instead, any contact would have to be made with “suitable utensils,” including deli tissue, spatulas, tongs and single-use gloves.

Wednesday, regulators of Oregon's Foodborne Illness Prevention Program announced that “…at this time, the ‘No Bare Hand Contact’ section of new food safety rules will not be adopted.”

Among the complaints raised by food experts: gloves give foodservice handlers a false sense of cleanliness, create more plastic waste (especially since plastic bags are banned in Oregon) and add a supplementary cost for restaurateurs.

Happy 50th birthday, Rolling Stones, especially the Taylor years.

Taking smugness to a new level, which is a worthy achievement given the level of smugness already found in Oregon, restaurant owners and chefs have successfully delayed a new no-hands rule for food contact.

Michael Russell of OregonLive writes the rule could make dining out more expensive, create waste and, despite its good intentions, do little to protect public health and isn’t safer than the state's current rigorous handwashing practices.

Except no one has validated whether those handwashing practices are actually followed or just sound smugly superior.

"The idea that using rubber gloves is going to stop people from getting sick is ludicrous," said Andy Ricker, chef and owner of Pok Pok restaurants in Portland and New York. His New York locations already comply with that state's no bare-hand-contact rule.

"For it to be safe, every time you touch something, you'd have to take your gloves off, wash your hands, and put on new gloves." Ricker said.

At least a half-dozen recent studies have concluded the same: Counter intuitively, wearing gloves does little to prevent the spread of bacteria compared with effective hand washing.

But wearing gloves is not the same as a no-bare-hand contact rule. They’re called tongs (not thongs).

Wearing gloves has been found to reduce the number of times people wash their hands, while warm, moist conditions create a hothouse for bacteria to grow. A 2005 report from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center that analyzed grilled tortillas found more staph, coliform and other harmful bacteria on the samples prepared by workers wearing gloves.

Eric Pippert, a manager with the Oregon Health Authority's Foodborne Illness Prevention department, said the measure was created to prevent the spread of norovirus, the most common cause of food poisoning. It's often spread through improper hand washing by employees after they use the bathroom.

Norovirus spreads easily; a don’t work while sick rule would be more effective at reducing the spread of norovirus (ask Harvard or Heston).

In response to those who favor hand washing, Pippert points to a 2003 health authority survey in which restaurant inspectors found at least one hand-washing violation at nearly two-thirds of Oregon eateries.

"Anybody who tells you hand washing is so darned good, well, yeah, except when you're not doing it," he said.

But restaurant owners argue that handwashing has since been drilled into cooks across the state. And they contend the rule -- which will affect bakeries and barrooms, fine dining and food carts -- would make gloves mandatory for many tasks, creating new headaches and new costs in a notoriously low-margin business. And those added costs might end up passed along to customers.

When asked for his thoughts on the new rule, sushi chef Bruce Lee at Hillsboro's Syun Izakaya replied, "When's that happening again, in January?"

For Lee, wearing gloves presents a concern beyond potential health risks.
"If you wear the glove, you're not able to feel the rice tenderness, or softness," he said. "Even wasabi -- you can feel how much you need with your fingers. But if you wear the glove, you're never going to feel it.

"If I had a choice, I wouldn't wear it."

And I wouldn’t want anyone temping food with their fingers.

“A clean hand is better than a dirty glove,” say the Aussies.

For years – decades – I’ve heard from food safety types at food service that they know gloves don’t do much during food prep, but the public complains if workers aren’t wearing their gloves; the gloves stay.

Which comes first, food service mindlessly blaming public perception, or taking responsibility and influencing public opinion based on evidence?

Aliza Green, a Philadelphia chef-consultant and author, had a great take on the glove-or-no-glove issue in the Washington Post a couple of days ago. Excerpts below:

A food preparation worker washes her hands and puts on gloves. She needs to make chicken salad. She starts by seasoning the poultry pieces, rubbing them with salt, pepper and herbs, and then spreads them out in a pan for steaming. Wearing the same pair of gloves, she dices celery and onions. She makes the dressing. Finally, she cuts up the cooked chicken, mixes the salad and packs it away, ready to sell.

A line cook with gloves on his freshly washed hands gets an order for a hamburger, grabs the raw patty from the refrigerator and slaps it on the grill. Once the burger is cooked, he picks up a bun and plates up the burger with lettuce, tomato and fries — all without pulling on a new pair.

In my more than 35 years in the food business as a chef and consultant, I have seen a lot of scary things. And those common scenes are among them.

I’ve been in and out of the kitchens in hotels and independent restaurants, of caterers and commissaries. These days, food handlers are expected to wear gloves especially when they’re working in public view. However, those gloves are good only if the hands they are covering are clean. To my mind, gloves are problematic; people equate them with food safety.

According to a 2007 study in the Journal of Food Protection, “Hand washing and glove use were also related to each other — hand washing was less likely to occur with activities in which gloves were worn.” A 2010 study in the same journal concludes, “Glove use can create a false sense of security, resulting in more high-risk behaviors that can lead to cross-contamination when employees are not adequately trained.” Also in the report: “Occlusion of the skin during long-term glove use in food operations creates the warm, moist conditions necessary for microbial proliferation and can increase pathogen transfer onto foods through leaks or exposed skin or during glove removal.” In other words, just wearing gloves can create dangerous conditions.

With the use of food-safe gloves of various materials, we have created a new set of problems as well: the huge waste of resources in producing and disposing of billions of pairs every year. It’s money that could be spent on kitchen improvements such as providing automatic or foot pedal-operated hand sinks and enough time for workers to wash their hands a reasonable number of times per day. People may be allergic to gloves, especially those made from latex, while potentially carcinogenic and toxic materials are used in making certain types of gloves.

Although there are some very good arguments to be made for wearing gloves in certain circumstances, such as when mixing a batch of meatballs and when workers have a wound on their hands, we should reevaluate the automatic and ubiquitous usage.

“People put those darn gloves on and they think they’re protected,” says Denise Korniewicz, dean of the college of nursing at the University of North Dakota and an expert on the efficacy of gloves. “The best way to prevent the transmission of bacteria, virus or other bug is to wash hands thoroughly, adhering to the protocols that we know work. When evaluating food safety, it’s not the gloves I observe; rather it’s what workers are doing with their hands, like using the phone or wiping their nose.”

Studies done in the United Kingdom and published in 2010 concluded that gloved hands can contribute as much, if not more, bacteria to foods than bare hands. That same year, an American study in a fast-food restaurant found more than twice as much coliform bacteria in tortilla samples handled by gloved workers compared with bare hands.

“We may need to make sure workers wash by putting cameras in the sink area of restrooms,” Korniewicz says. “All too often, they haven’t been provided with convenient, clean hand sinks with plenty of soap and paper towels. If enough time and proper materials for washing were provided, we could all have more confidence in the safety of prepared food, reducing our dependence on gloves.”

Using gloves in the kitchen dates back further than you might realize. In Rome about 2,500 years ago, “the wealthier classes kept slave bakers; very grand people made these slaves wear gloves to knead the dough and masks to protect it from perspiration and the breath of the common person,” according to “A History of Food,” by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. The first use of rubber gloves was in 1883. Eleven years later, they were included in the standard surgical procedure at Johns Hopkins Hospital. An Australian company, Ansell, created the first disposable latex medical gloves in 1964 by adapting the technique they use for the manufacture of condoms.

Jared Johnson, executive chef for the Heathland Hospitality Group in Philadelphia, told me “the average person is more aware of cross-contamination and food-borne illnesses than 10 years ago. If my crew wears gloves while serving, it puts the customer at ease and we can focus on the food and service. However, I’m not a fan of wearing gloves while chopping, because glove pieces could end up in the food.”

Wearing gloves is meant to protect the consumer from dangerous diseases that can be transmitted mostly through ready-to-eat foods. Culprits include the viruses hepatitis A and the highly contagious norovirus, responsible for about 50 percent of all outbreaks of food-related illness and transmitted through foods such as leafy greens, fresh fruits and shellfish. Bacteria that cause serious food-borne illnesses include E. coli, found in cattle and in infected humans; salmonella typhi, which lives only in humans; shigella, which is transmitted mostly through eating or drinking contaminated food or water; and listeria, which is found in unpasteurized dairy products and ready-to-eat foods such as deli meats and soft cheeses.

Regulations for glove use vary greatly within and outside the United States. FDA recommends handwashing before making food and putting on gloves to make food. In New York state, ready-to-eat food must be prepared and served without bare-hand contact by wearing gloves or, alternatively, using tongs, forks and spoons, deli paper, wax paper, napkins or spatulas. The Arkansas Department of Health has a different viewpoint: “Glove usage has not been proven to lower the incidence of food-borne illnesses. Gloves become just as dirty as the bare hand but are not as likely to be replaced as often as the hands are washed.”

Note that liquid hand sanitizers are to be used after handwashing, not as a substitute for it, and that hands must then be allowed to air-dry after using them and before working with food.

Regulations and practices must be workable, however. I recently had to take a ServeSafe course created by the National Restaurant Association. Food managers working in Philadelphia are required to take it and to pass the certification exam. My classmates included a young woman starting a specialty cookie business, the manager of a senior services facility in a church, the owner of a drive-in movie theater that serves food and the owner of a neighborhood pizzeria.

I found the information overly detailed, highly impractical and lacking in simple basic principles based on common sense. In one case study in the course book, a food worker was supposed to have washed his hands 12 times in the time between breakfast and lunch service. That would never happen in any kitchen I’ve ever seen.

To improve food safety in real-life conditions, the CDC recommends revising food preparation methods to reduce the number of handwashings needed, for example by decreasing the number of times a worker has to handle raw meat when making a sandwich. 

Sorenne’s school is doing the hatching-chicks-thing in anticipation of Easter (which is a surprisingly big deal in Australia) and I’ve been doing my best Dougie-Downer about handwashing, Salmonella, pestilence and death.

In the northern Hemisphere, this is apparently the start of the petting farm season (didn’t have that one penciled in), so the UK Health Protection Agency is reminding people, especially those with responsibility for young children, to enjoy their farm visits safely by ensuring good hand hygiene after touching farm animals or their surroundings.

Outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness associated with contact with farm animals peak in the spring and summer as this coincides with schools holidays when visits to petting farms tend to be more popular, although outbreaks can occur at other times.

The route of transmission in these illnesses, which include the infections E. coli O157 and Cryptosporidium, is direct contact with animals in petting and feeding areas as well as contact with the droppings of animals on contaminated surfaces around farms.

Dr Bob Adak, head of the gastrointestinal diseases department at the HPA, said, “… hand gels or wipes have their uses in areas that are generally clean, such as offices or hospitals, but they are not effective in completely removing from soiled hands bugs such as E. coli or Cryptosporidium that are commonly found in animal droppings and on contaminated surfaces around farms. This is why washing the hands thoroughly with soap and water is so important - it is the only way to effectively remove the bacteria and reduce the risk of becoming unwell.”

Figures from the HPA’s national surveillance system show that there were 61 outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness associated with farms visits between 1992 and 2011. Twenty two of these outbreaks (36 per cent) occurred in the last three years (2009-11).

Around half were caused by E. coli O157 and around half were caused by Cryptosporidium. A handful were caused by Salmonella. Overall 1,238 people were affected in these outbreaks – 1,003 people with Cryptosporidium and 235 with E. coli O157.

A table of petting farm-related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/petting-zoos-outbreaks.

We’ll have more to say about this once our research paper, led by Gonzalo, completes the peer review process and gets published.