going with the flow

It's just a hair, things like this happen. I never complain about things like this at a restaurant - unless it was something like a finger in my salad.

Most chefs prepare food with their bare hands. I can never see why a hair is such a big deal. Good philosophy nevertheless.

It could be a hair from their armpit, it could be a hair from their groin area. The thing is you dont know what kind of hair it is. Has the hair been cleaned in the past few weeks? Why arent they using gloves to prepare the food and wearing a cap? The main issue is, if one could be careless enough to let their hair fall into the food they want others to eat, what else could the be careless enough to let get into the food?



I dont suppose you'd find a finger nail in your soup a big deal then?

You'd be hard pressed to find a chef who wears gloves at any decent restaurant. A hair doesn't bother me much because we humans shed hair and skin every day. A fingernail, on the other hand, doesn't come off by itself. If you think wearing gloves and a cap signifies cleanliness, just pop by any local fast food restaurant. They give you the illusion of cleanliness, which is often time necessary because the place is anything but clean.

Yeah, the gloves are meaningless -- they actually make things less hygenic, because the worker is less likely to remove them when they should, or to wash their hands. If they need to wipe the sweat off their brow or tie their shoelace, do you think they're going to take the trouble to take their gloves off? No they bend down, tie their shoe (whose laces have been flapping around on the dirty floor and been trod on by the dogshit-covered shoe sole), and then finish prepping your sandwich. Bon appetit!

This is one rationale that I never understood.

Way back when, I used to work in a deli. We were required to wear gloves. However, some employees would go for two or three hours (if we were quite busy) wearing the same pair of gloves, all the while handling food, spoons, touching counters, using the scale, etc. with their gloved hands.

It was a real pain in the ass to wash your hands while wearing gloves, because inevitably water would sneak inside and become very annoying.

I made the arguement that it would be much more sanitary to do without the gloves and wash your hands every 15 minutes or so (really not that hard) rather than go for up to a couple of hours while wearing the same pair of gloves, but nobody else saw it that way. They saw gloves as some magical barrier that could never get dirty or germy.

I'm sure Ken Pollock would agree with you 100%.

I could see a paragraph long rant about the incompetence of US food workers.

Paragraph? I was thinking a novel along the lines of 'The Jungle'

Boys........that's just not nice!!!!!!

I'm no expert, but I imagine that in some areas glove might be dictated by local health codes.

I think the gloves are actually to "protect" the diners from catching whatever it is oozing out of the sores on the food-prep dude's hand.

Right, they are, but it seems as though the code is in place to ease the mind of the consumer than to actually do a whole lot of good.