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That hot dog is wrapped in foil and probably was prepared by someone wearing gloves though. Health depts around the country are more and more insisting on glove

That hot dog is wrapped in foil and probably was prepared by someone wearing gloves though. Health depts around the country are more and more insisting on glove wearing for basically everything, though that has its own problems and is debatably less sanitary in certain ways. Health depts are particularly obsessed with utensils too. The plastic is because of all of the hands that might be reaching into wherever they are if they're self-serve, if they're dropped, etc.

m000 3y ago
I wonder, is this obsession with sanitary utensils founded on some real-life study? Or is it pure paranoia and made-up lab tests ("What would happen if I dip my fork in this anthrax solution?").
- bombcar 3y ago
  Some of it is “real” but some of it is kind of cargo-cult. Someone wearing gloves for their entire shift doesn’t really provide anything protective. You have to regularly change gloves to make it worthwhile.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Well, the fecal oral route of transmission of things like norovirus is very real. If you just set out a big bin of utensils, I've no doubt gross people will spread gross diseases that way. That certainly is not a slam dunk case for individually wrapping forks though. If the fork is in a plastic wrapper, you touch that and can still pick up the germs from it. It's some amount of reduction of spreading pathogens I am sure, how much I do not think we know. It is also, however, cheap and easy and not a really big hit to the environment, plastic wrappers on utensils probably don't make the top 1,000 sources of carbon emissions or landfill space. The best solution (and you see this at places like stadiums now, and spreading to fast food) are the little machines with a hopper that dispense the utensils. You can get a sanitary supply with no individual wrapping. But they're not practical in situations like a hot dog vendor who is walking around passing stuff out. And you're still touching the little lever that 1,000 people before you did. Nothing's perfect, it's all tradeoffs, but to a health department, they get no thanks from the public for sparing landfills from plastic wrappers, but they do get blamed whenever an outbreak happens, so you can expect them to err on the side of caution.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Also, eho is eating a hotdog with a fork and knife? At a baseball game.
RealityVoid 3y ago
You kind of addressed the gloves thing, but I want to express my confusion how gloves make things cleaner. Where you put your hands, you put your gloves hands, so cross-contamination works the same way. Gloves work to: - not get your hands dirty - easily switch between a dirty state to a clean state (remove dirty glove) - prevent.. body contamination? How much is that a real concern though?
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Right so gloves are an obvious win if you have a cut on your fingers or something like that. Chefs could generally be relied on to use them in that situation anyway, for their own protection. There are a lot of acidic salty things that hurt. In other situations, food-borne illness mostly happens through cross contamination. Gloves would help there too if one changed them frequently, but people tend not to and it’s hard to make them do so at appropriate times. Some studies show that basically they are more likely to wash their hands when needed (likely because you feel that chicken juice on your hands) than change gloves. That’s why it’s debatable. People either wash their hands or change their gloves, and (excepting things like a cut on your fingers) whichever they do more is probably safer.

m000 3y ago

I wonder, is this obsession with sanitary utensils founded on some real-life study? Or is it pure paranoia and made-up lab tests ("What would happen if I dip my fork in this anthrax solution?").

bombcar 3y ago
Some of it is “real” but some of it is kind of cargo-cult. Someone wearing gloves for their entire shift doesn’t really provide anything protective. You have to regularly change gloves to make it worthwhile.
mattmaroon 3y ago
Well, the fecal oral route of transmission of things like norovirus is very real. If you just set out a big bin of utensils, I've no doubt gross people will spread gross diseases that way. That certainly is not a slam dunk case for individually wrapping forks though. If the fork is in a plastic wrapper, you touch that and can still pick up the germs from it. It's some amount of reduction of spreading pathogens I am sure, how much I do not think we know. It is also, however, cheap and easy and not a really big hit to the environment, plastic wrappers on utensils probably don't make the top 1,000 sources of carbon emissions or landfill space. The best solution (and you see this at places like stadiums now, and spreading to fast food) are the little machines with a hopper that dispense the utensils. You can get a sanitary supply with no individual wrapping. But they're not practical in situations like a hot dog vendor who is walking around passing stuff out. And you're still touching the little lever that 1,000 people before you did. Nothing's perfect, it's all tradeoffs, but to a health department, they get no thanks from the public for sparing landfills from plastic wrappers, but they do get blamed whenever an outbreak happens, so you can expect them to err on the side of caution.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Also, eho is eating a hotdog with a fork and knife? At a baseball game.

RealityVoid 3y ago

You kind of addressed the gloves thing, but I want to express my confusion how gloves make things cleaner. Where you put your hands, you put your gloves hands, so cross-contamination works the same way. Gloves work to: - not get your hands dirty - easily switch between a dirty state to a clean state (remove dirty glove) - prevent.. body contamination? How much is that a real concern though?

mattmaroon 3y ago
Right so gloves are an obvious win if you have a cut on your fingers or something like that. Chefs could generally be relied on to use them in that situation anyway, for their own protection. There are a lot of acidic salty things that hurt. In other situations, food-borne illness mostly happens through cross contamination. Gloves would help there too if one changed them frequently, but people tend not to and it’s hard to make them do so at appropriate times. Some studies show that basically they are more likely to wash their hands when needed (likely because you feel that chicken juice on your hands) than change gloves. That’s why it’s debatable. People either wash their hands or change their gloves, and (excepting things like a cut on your fingers) whichever they do more is probably safer.