In the food service business, gloves are good at spreading pathogens. Take Chipotle, for example. It turns out that the company requires all employees to wear gloves while working. And that means that the employee (or employees) who contributed to the norovirus outbreak must have been wearing gloves while they were preparing food. What happened? Foodbeast spoke to Timothy Fisher, a Fresh Foods Department Manager and Culinary Institute of America (CIA) graduate, and discovered that gloves don’t really cover many hazards.
“People wearing gloves touch all sorts of things besides food and continue to use the gloves. Technically they should change gloves after they’ve touched anything that isn’t food related, and most health standards say you should also wash your hands before putting on new gloves. But that takes so much time!”
Upping hand-washing practices and recognizing that gloves can spread germs is the solution. Unfortunately, too many people believe that gloves are more important than actual cleansing. And that includes employees, who according to a 2007 CDC study, acknowledged that they didn’t wash or change gloves when they should have — including when they were handling raw meat. In fact, the study notes that food service professionals only washed their hands 27 percent of the time they knew they were supposed to.
Source: https://uproxx.com
