The western concept of "dirty" has contributed a lot to waste. In certain other cultures, human hands are considered to be clean (with the onus being on the handler to make sure their hands are, in fact, clean) and it's quite OK to touch something someone else will touch with their bare skin (or even eat from).
It's not even a rational obsession with zero human contact. A (true) chef is not expected to cook with gloves on. His hands are going to be all over your food while he's in the back. Chefs probably will taste something out of the pot to see if it's coming along ok. We know this (though perhaps try to avoid thinking about it). We'll eat nasty hotdogs at the ball game that have been handed to you down the bleachers by eight pairs of hands, but insist that our plastic cutlery come wrapped in further plastic.
That hot dog is wrapped in foil and probably was prepared by someone wearing gloves though. Health depts around the country are more and more insisting on glove wearing for basically everything, though that has its own problems and is debatably less sanitary in certain ways.
Health depts are particularly obsessed with utensils too. The plastic is because of all of the hands that might be reaching into wherever they are if they're self-serve, if they're dropped, etc.
You kind of addressed the gloves thing, but I want to express my confusion how gloves make things cleaner. Where you put your hands, you put your gloves hands, so cross-contamination works the same way.
Gloves work to:
- not get your hands dirty
- easily switch between a dirty state to a clean state (remove dirty glove)
- prevent.. body contamination? How much is that a real concern though?
Right so gloves are an obvious win if you have a cut on your fingers or something like that. Chefs could generally be relied on to use them in that situation anyway, for their own protection. There are a lot of acidic salty things that hurt.
In other situations, food-borne illness mostly happens through cross contamination. Gloves would help there too if one changed them frequently, but people tend not to and it’s hard to make them do so at appropriate times. Some studies show that basically they are more likely to wash their hands when needed (likely because you feel that chicken juice on your hands) than change gloves. That’s why it’s debatable. People either wash their hands or change their gloves, and (excepting things like a cut on your fingers) whichever they do more is probably safer.
I wonder, is this obsession with sanitary utensils founded on some real-life study? Or is it pure paranoia and made-up lab tests ("What would happen if I dip my fork in this anthrax solution?").
Well, the fecal oral route of transmission of things like norovirus is very real. If you just set out a big bin of utensils, I've no doubt gross people will spread gross diseases that way.
That certainly is not a slam dunk case for individually wrapping forks though. If the fork is in a plastic wrapper, you touch that and can still pick up the germs from it. It's some amount of reduction of spreading pathogens I am sure, how much I do not think we know. It is also, however, cheap and easy and not a really big hit to the environment, plastic wrappers on utensils probably don't make the top 1,000 sources of carbon emissions or landfill space.
The best solution (and you see this at places like stadiums now, and spreading to fast food) are the little machines with a hopper that dispense the utensils. You can get a sanitary supply with no individual wrapping. But they're not practical in situations like a hot dog vendor who is walking around passing stuff out. And you're still touching the little lever that 1,000 people before you did.
Nothing's perfect, it's all tradeoffs, but to a health department, they get no thanks from the public for sparing landfills from plastic wrappers, but they do get blamed whenever an outbreak happens, so you can expect them to err on the side of caution.
Some of it is “real” but some of it is kind of cargo-cult. Someone wearing gloves for their entire shift doesn’t really provide anything protective. You have to regularly change gloves to make it worthwhile.
Besides some filthy cultures in the East, the majority of Eastern cultures have cleanliness even baked into their faith affecting everything from how they shower to how they pray to how they eat.
I put "dirty" in quotes for a reason. People are just expected to hold themselves to a higher standard of cleanliness in other cultures instead of hacking around it with copious amounts of plastic.
Much of the rest of the civilized world holds cleanliness in high(er) regard, but they're not germophobes.
Hand washing doesn't need to be constant to be effective in the vast majority of situations, especially the situations where you're setting up a big bunch of items and you could wrap them.
I don’t think that it is about hands being clean or not clean. The wrapper on a disposable utensil is a kind of tamper evident “seal” attesting that this particular utensil hasn’t been used yet.
I can see that having started as a marketing ploy and have very little to do with hygiene reasons. I.e., how much can one manufacturer differentiate their disposable plastic forks? Very little. They're all plastic, they're all forks.
Until someone put them in a plastic wrapper and marketed them as "sealed for your protection". They hit a nerve in the society, and soon people demanded them and they became the norm.
I don't think it has to do with cleanliness per se... might be about legal liability? An unopened package tells you that it's there as-is from the manufacturer. It seems more like it's about ensuring the product's integrity through the chain of custody than anything else.
It absolutely is not a western concept. China takes the spirit you describe, but not the gloves or food example, and ramps it up to 10. There was no such thing as a cloth mask in China, for instance. There is also no market for used goods. If its not new its dirty.
And just talking plastic waste in general, East Asia is far and away the biggest polluter.
It's not even a rational obsession with zero human contact. A (true) chef is not expected to cook with gloves on. His hands are going to be all over your food while he's in the back. Chefs probably will taste something out of the pot to see if it's coming along ok. We know this (though perhaps try to avoid thinking about it). We'll eat nasty hotdogs at the ball game that have been handed to you down the bleachers by eight pairs of hands, but insist that our plastic cutlery come wrapped in further plastic.