Comment by dust42
1 day ago
So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear means we get an extra dose of micro plastics? Yikes.
1 day ago
So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear means we get an extra dose of micro plastics? Yikes.
Funnily, I believe the glove mandates for food prep are actually anti-hygiene.
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.
> So you are less likely to replace gloves when you should.
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 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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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Just typical "programmer thinks they know how to do every job, especially the ones they've never done"
People also don't develop good habits and constantly touch their face with gloves. I worked with surgeons in the hospital and they would point this out. Equally important in a cleanroom.
Yes but most people find it icky and would complain, especially if it's visible behind the counter. Customer is king... I can also imagine it helps with legal liability, "but we were so careful, we even mandated gloves!"
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.
Uh yea. That’s why most places use washed hands not gloves.
I’ve never seen for example sushi portrayed with anything but bare hands
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 says similar.
“ 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.
Stearates are considered very safe chemical compounds. They are derived from stearic acid which is one of the most common fatty acids and metal ions such as sodium and magnesium. Sodium stearate is a common soap and magnesium stearate is one of the most common additives in pharmaceuticals. This means that they are practically everywhere and but also easily digested in small amounts.
I'm still not aware of any reason to worry about micro plastics. As far as I know they seem harmless?
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.
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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.
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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.
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> So basically the gloves that kitchen staff now must wear [..]
Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.
At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?
It's not better, it's a lazy shortcut so they have to wash their hands less and don't feel gross touching raw meat.
The stearates aren't microplastics, they aren't polymers, but they have chemical/spectroscopic similarity that results in them confusing the microplastics assays.
In the article it explains that what they release are not microplastics
How tricky the whole topic is
No: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563392
The transparent disposable food-service gloves are usually polyethylene so I wouldn't think they would have the exact same false-positive result as the nitrile gloves. Microscopic particles of stearates are what's on these nitrile gloves, not actual polymer dust or excess abrasive losses.
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.