> I don't know why you think food service workers aren't constantly putting on new gloves...

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.

> 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.

Many food service workers don't use gloves and don't wash their hands after going to the toilet, from what I have observed.

> 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 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.

Food safety regulations in most states require that food workers replace gloves if they handle raw meat and switch to other foodstuffs.

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.

Just typical "programmer thinks they know how to do every job, especially the ones they've never done"

Yeah, that's more the problem than anything else.

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.

Sushi chefs spend years learning the correct feel of the fish - when it's warm enough, when it's slimy. Japanese are taken aback when they are forced to wear gloves for "safety", which at least in that case is entirely counter productive.

It is true that there is not currently conclusive proof that micro plastics are a significant risk to human health. However, this is the same line the tobacco industry used for decades even though they knew different.

Many negative health effects have been associated with microplastics and related chemicals. Not sure if there's yet anything causative, but I think it's probably a matter of time and there's lots of research to be done. I'd bet the health effect of microplastics (or anything that human body isn't used to) is more likely to be negative than not.

I think any time a new material starts to meaningfully accumulate in our bodies, our food sources, our oceans, etc, we should at least go with caution. The default stance should be caution, not fearlessness.

The problem isn't just the plastics themselves. Plastics are chemical "sponges" that will soak up pollutants over time from the environment (brominated fire retardants, bisphenols, PBCs, pesticides, phthalates, heavy metals, etc) and deliver them in a concentrated dose into the body.

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.