Posted on 01/12/2014 3:25:45 PM PST by nickcarraway
A great sushi chef in another state once complained to me about a health code violation he'd received for making sushi without gloves. "Making sushi with gloves is like making love with a condom," he said. "It just isn't the same." Well, as of Jan. 1, California's law has changed so that there can no longer be any bare-handed contact with foods that won't be cooked. That means baked goods, salads - and yes, even sushi.
According to Nation's Restaurant News, the new law will undergo a "soft rollout" over the next six months, meaning restaurants will receive warnings rather than violations on inspection reports so that owners and operators can become familiar with the new law. NRN describes the specifics of the law:
Under the new rules, such foods must be handled with single-use gloves or utensils like tongs, forks, spoons, bakery or deli wraps, wax paper, scoops, spatulas, or dispensing equipment.
As mandated previously, foodservice workers must also thoroughly wash hands with soap and warm water before entering a food preparation area, before putting on clean gloves or between glove changes. That's a lot of hand washing.
It's hard to imagine the sushi masters at our finest Japanese restaurants adhering to this rule. So much of sushi preparation is about feel and tactile sense memory.
There is a way for restaurants to seek an exemption for specific situations, but it's unlikely that the exemption covers "thousands of years of tradition."
Hooray for safe sex, we suppose?
Is it a robot or a rawbot?
How do we know that the gloves are clean? Is each pair going to be hermetically sealed? What about the factory where the gloves are made? They probably come from China.
I would think CA would have had a law in place about that already since they have a law for everything else. Oh, I forgot, it’s CA.
Doubt they would follow this. I just came from the fabric district and they gave us plastic bags, not paper.
Someone still has to clean the robot. Having cleaned a few Hobarts in my younger days, I can tell you that there are some scuzzy food preparation machines in the commercial & institutional kitchens of the country.
An understanding of the necessity of cleanliness and an individual commitment to that by everyone of the kitchen & wait staff would be far more effective that a hundred new regulations.
Bureaucrats & lawyers either are ignorant of this fact or deliberately choose to ignore it.
Sushi bars charging at least $20 per piece will be exempt as ‘performance art’.
This.
You are absolutely correct.
The best way to break nanny state control freaks of this false sense of security is to put on a pair of food handling gloves and obviously pick your nose while wearing them.
Most people would rather have correctly washed clean hands touching their food if they think about it for any length of time.
In the kitchens that I managed, I checked fingernails daily and would fire someone for not washing their hands properly.
/johnny
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