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Monday afternoon, instead of sitting around in our pajamas and baking cookies, we had the pleasure of attending a King County Food Worker class, a necessary evil which must be endured in order to obtain a Food Handler’s Card. On our scant and unpaid time off, we the food workers of King County trundle off to strange and inconvenient locations to listen to a lecture, watch a video and fill in a Scantron sheet. The experience should be about on par with taking the SATs, but instead ours was pretty amusing and even a little thought-provoking--if not intentionally.
Our lecture focused on something the instructor obliquely referred to as “toilet paper failure.” While we could guess what she meant (something like condom failure?), we were surprised at how naturally, how fluently she used the expression, so much so that we actually started to believe it was a real expression, like “water damage” or “stop sign.” However, it seemed that the point of all this “toilet paper failure” talk was to scare us into: a) washing our hands for approximately 50% of the working day and b) NEVER, ever touching any “ready to eat” food with our disgusting, filthy, failed-by-toilet-paper-and-seven-rounds-of-anti-bacterial-soap hands.
Fatty Tuna! by Nikchik from the Seattlest Flickr pool. Thx, Nikchik!
Next we watched a video which lured us in with shots of the oh-so-charming Kong Family of Perche’No Italian Restaurant (something about Marco Polo and noodles and togetherness) and also (thankfully) illustrated how to pour vats of refried beans into shallow pans for cooling. Again we were assaulted with instructions on hand-washing (by the time you sing la Marseillaise backwards twice, you should be about ready to rinse) and of course, the dreaded words were repeated: no bare hand contact.
“No bare hand contact,” as we refer to it in the biz, means that no one can ever touch food that will not be cooked again with bare hands. They could scrub their hands until they are raw and then soak them in bleach. Nonetheless: No. Bare. Hand. Contact. At a bakery or a fast food establishment, where someone might be grabbing a pastry, then handling cash and answering phones, this makes perfect sense. But the rule seems to go a little too far. For example: would you want sushi from a chef who had gloves on? “Hey, there might be some little bones in your fish, but I have no idea because I can’t feel anything through my nasty latex gloves.” Or, when you go to a very very fancy restaurant, do you really think that micro greens can be so lovingly arranged atop your teetering food without the nimble fingers of an unpaid intern?
Before anyone gets nervous, stops eating our food and alerts the authorities, we should say that when at work we follow the King County standards. But at home, we’re much more lax. Because we have to wonder: is an increasingly sanitized kitchen in which we touch everything with latex going to make us healthier, or instead, is it going to burden the world with more and more waste while rendering us more sickly and susceptible to every germ that crosses our path?
Not that the concept of toilet paper failure isn’t pretty gross.
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