Unlike bare skin, you can't really feel when your gloves are contaminated. So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should. With bare hands, you can feel the raw chicken juices on you, so it's pretty natural to want to wash your hands right after handling the raw chicken.
Gloves are important in medicine, but that's with proper use where doctors and nurses put on new gloves for every patient. That doesn't always happen.
To the contrary. You take off and throw out your gloves every time you finish doing something with raw meat. It's procedure. It's habit.
You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
I think that because I was a food service worker and it's impossible to change gloves during a rush. Nitrile gloves and sweaty hands simply do not mix. There are also many more forms of cross contamination than just raw meat to cooked food.
Gloves require your hands to be perfectly dry to put on effectively.
You can dry your hands on a towel in seconds. I don't know what you mean by "perfectly dry"...? Like, nobody needs to blow-dry their hands before putting gloves on or anything.
If you don't flap your hands around for 30+ seconds, any remaining moisture from handwashing (or sweat) makes them stick to your skin and you wind up fighting them (and about half the time, ripping a hole). A towel is not enough.
I've seen enough absent-minded nose wipes on the back of gloves at Chipotle-style establishments to be pretty OK with this take.
And that's where people are watching.
You are supposed to. I've seen plenty of fast food places where the gloves stay on between jobs.
I'm sure there are upscale places that are better on this point.
> You're never relying on "feel" to determine whether there are "raw chicken juices on you". Using "feel" is not reliable.
If you were just working with raw chicken, that slimy feeling on your skin is a pretty good motivator for most people to immediately wash their hands. It's more than just procedure or habit, your hands feel dirty and you want to wash that off.
> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves, but doctors and nurses are. Like, if you're cutting up chicken for an hour you're not, but if you're moving from chicken to veggies you absolutely are.
You absolutely are supposed to. But there's a gap in what you are supposed to do vs what actually happens in practice. Especially if you get a penny pinching boss that doesn't like wasting money on gloves.
That doesn't happen so much in medicine because the consequences are much higher. But for food? Not uncommon. There are more than a few restaurants with open kitchens that I've had to stop eating at because employees could be seen handling a bunch of things with the same set of gloves on.
It also does not help that food is often a mad rush.
I'm not sure that's reliable across people. I'm definitely like that; whenever my hands feel the least bit dirty or oily or anything, I really want to wash them. But I've run into people who have commented on the fact that I do that, and I've learned that there are lots of people who just don't have that compulsion at all.
My point is that changing gloves is something that is even less reliable and needs to be drilled in through procedure and habit. Handwashing also needs the procedure and habit, but it has the added benefit that for a good number of people there's also a physical compulsion that goes along with that procedure and habit.
But they don't generally require them to replace gloves between batches of (the same kind of) meat, or between different kinds of vegetables, or when switching from vegetables to meat, or between customers if they're on a service line. While it's recommended in those situations, I'm not sure any state mandates it.
And it's true that you would get cleaner food prep if you used gloves properly. However, that requires a lot of gloves getting thrown away.
I’ve never seen for example sushi portrayed with anything but bare hands
“ Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.”
Stearates aren’t microplastics. Maybe we need to be concerned with stearate pollution too.
We’ve reached the absurd point where all sides of the political spectrum have sacred cows, and an exceedingly poor understanding of scientific reasoning, and all sides also try to dunk on the others by claiming scientific authority.
I mean, I get the instinct that foreign-entity can't exactly be good for me, but the same instinct applied to GMOs, and as far as I know organic foods have never yielded any sort of statistically visible health impacts.
Plastics earn their keep in general by being non-reactive and 'durable', so it's not entirely shocking if they can pass through (or hang around inside) the body without engaging in a lot of biochemical activity.
I'd also consider plastic, and their additives, to be a lot bigger and longer lasting unknown than GMOs.
I have seen zero evidence that they are bad in very small quantities, but the dose can make the poison and they are out there in increasingly alarming quantities.
More like flippancy, even hubris.
The approach you advocate is essentially the EU's precautionary principle. [1]
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/the-preca...
Even if plastics of all sizes are 100% biologically inert, they're still a Trojan Horse for other toxins.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Verla-Wirnkor-2/publica...
Roughly 50% of indoor dust is composed of microplastics, so it's not like it's uncommon.
I highly doubt that. Soil, skin and pollen are usually the big ones. Hairs depending one how you count dust, but eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic, unless you allow really large particle sizes.
[edit] Checking research. The highest claim I found was 39% of fibres (in household dust, Japan). but that seemed to be per particle not by volume.
>eliminating hair like fibres would also eliminate most of the sources of plastic
If you allow fibres they'd be 0.01% of fibres if you've got a dog anything like mine.
One of the sources of intentionally manufactured microplastics are known as porous polymers in fine mesh sizes.
This is over a $1 billion market and growing.
One of the pharmaceutical uses is precisely as a medium to deliver oral medications in a time-release way.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/porouspolymer-bead-real-world...
These porous polymer powders consist entirely of microscopic little sponges where they soak up and/or leach out all kinds of chemicals more so than the plain polymer, and with different affinity too.
However, even when common waste plastic particles themselves are not microscopically porous, different plastics soak up different chemicals to different degrees depending on what type of contact they come into. For instance kilos of polyethylene nurdles floating in the water will actually become "soaked" with some hydrocarbon liquids that are also floating or dissolved in the water. Even physically softened. These are very solid pea-sized beads that are not micro-sized plastics at all. They would have to degrade a whole lot before they fall into the micro category. And they are not manufactured to intentionally have a nano-porous structure like the finer mesh porous polymer powders.
Chemicals and plastics just don't go away so safely every time.
Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.
At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?
Maybe a different false-positive particle type in significant amounts is on the polyethylene ones ?
Pure stearates in micro amounts would be expected to be related to mild food-grade soaps, which do end up dissolving in water or oil and do not remain solid like a relatively immobile polymer particle would do.