4 ms·

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

• 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.