HOW TO USE GLOVES

I wrote this email to a restaurant chain that shall remain nameless for now. If I go back and they are still having problems, I'm going public.

 

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Dear ________,

I believe your employees in SoCal need a refresher on how, and why, they should wear gloves.

 

I say this because I enjoy eating at your fine restaurants, but I also used to enjoy a certain burrito chain, and then they poisoned a bunch of people because their employees were using dirty hands. Now I don't eat those burritos. I don't want to lose you as well. So this letter is for my benefit as much as it is for yours.

 

A little background: I am an RN, and I was also a health department inspector for a little while, so I know gloves. I change gloves daily on countless occasions. I am also not a fan of gloves in food service, because they give people a false sense of security. Because the hand underneath the glove is clean, the worker forgets that the glove itself gets dirty really fast. So people don't take them off when they should.

 

I have seen your employees on multiple occasions (I eat at your restaurant often) using their gloved hands to remove the lids from food storage containers, open cooler doors, touch cash register screens, touch their own clothing, and (gross!) handle money, and then use those same gloved hands to reach into food bins and touch the food that people would then eat.

 

Anyone who took a college Chemistry 101 class probably performed the experiment of swabbing money and placing the specimen in a petri dish, and coming back a few days later to see what was growing. E.Coli usually showed up somewhere in the classroom. So "don't touch money" should be a no-brainer. But as a health inspector, I was also very nervous about people touching doors to coolers or other surfaces, and then touching food. How do we know those surfaces are clean? We don't.

 

I don't understand why California allows mingling of foods--reaching into a bin with a gloved hand, and then reaching into another bin with that same gloved hand, spreads the food residue from one bin to another. You have bell peppers, for example, which are a member of the nightshade family, and are commonly a source of food allergies. When I worked as a health inspector, I was told to require facilities to have separate serving utensils for each bin. But California is a wacky state, so apparently the health inspectors don't mind it here. So let's let that pass.

 

HOWEVER, when an employee wipes her gloved hands on her shirt and then sticks that hand into a bin of food, that entire bin of food should be thrown away.  (I didn't tell anyone to do this. But when I saw this, I didn't get that topping that day.)

 

I have an exhaustive list of infractions by your employees, but it's just the same thing over and over. Grossness, grossness, dirty dirty grossness. You get the picture. So, in conclusion of this long letter, let me just say this: A hand should be gloved immediately before touching food, never a moment before, and then as soon as that customer's food handling is over, the glove should come off. If that worker needs to touch a surface or cooler door or big white tub of cheese, the glove should be taken off and thrown away, and then a NEW glove should be put on to finish the order. This means, unless you are set up like a Ford auto plant and everyone has only one job over and over, each new customer's pizza gets a new pair of gloves. And, duh, never touch a cash register (?!?!?!) and then go back to touching someone else's food.

 

I am available to host a glove-utilization technique class for your employees in LA, for the price of some free lunch. If not me, you need someone to do it, because this is how that burrito chain got in trouble and spread E.Coli to a bunch of people.  All it takes is one person with dirty hands. Watch yourself.

 

Sincerely,
Dan Renzi, R.N.