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After I ‘retired’, I managed a bar and restaurant in Alaska for a while. It was an interesting, if tiring, job and I much enjoyed living in a part of the world I knew quite well.
As anyone in the catering business will testify, cleanliness and strict hygiene are watchwords. Let these standards fall and the business may fail. Restaurant managers must ensure good hygiene standards are maintained and there is always the possibility of a Health Inspector making an unannounced call.
So I find it curious, if not a little disturbing, that the contestants in BBCs MasterChef series seem to pay little attention to good hygiene practices.
They very often do not wear hats to cover their hair, unlike most of the chefs in the restaurants in which they sometimes work. There is the towel or rag, hung from the waist, used to wipe the edges of the plates about to be sent out to customers; the same cloth used to mop sweaty brows.
Worst of all are the fingers - which I have yet to see covered up by disposable gloves. Fingers used to taste food, to wipe sweaty brows, even noses, to handle pots and pans and to handle the food itself. So much of the food produced in this and other television programmes are overly handled by fingers that are never washed or covered. Yuck!
My experience in that restaurant in Alaska heightened my awareness of what goes on in kitchens, especially busy ones, and ever since then I have avoided the sort of pretentious restaurants in which the equally pretentious food is likely to have been handled by - let’s not be afraid to say it - various mucky fingers.
Masterchef is a interesting and entertaining programme. But where are the most basic of hygiene procedures? Where are the hats to stop greasy hair falling onto food? Where are the disposable gloves? The producers of this programme need to start enforcing some basic hygiene procedures!
.
After I ‘retired’, I managed a bar and restaurant in Alaska for a while. It was an interesting, if tiring, job and I much enjoyed living in a part of the world I knew quite well.
As anyone in the catering business will testify, cleanliness and strict hygiene are watchwords. Let these standards fall and the business may fail. Restaurant managers must ensure good hygiene standards are maintained and there is always the possibility of a Health Inspector making an unannounced call.
So I find it curious, if not a little disturbing, that the contestants in BBCs MasterChef series seem to pay little attention to good hygiene practices.
They very often do not wear hats to cover their hair, unlike most of the chefs in the restaurants in which they sometimes work. There is the towel or rag, hung from the waist, used to wipe the edges of the plates about to be sent out to customers; the same cloth used to mop sweaty brows.
Worst of all are the fingers - which I have yet to see covered up by disposable gloves. Fingers used to taste food, to wipe sweaty brows, even noses, to handle pots and pans and to handle the food itself. So much of the food produced in this and other television programmes are overly handled by fingers that are never washed or covered. Yuck!
My experience in that restaurant in Alaska heightened my awareness of what goes on in kitchens, especially busy ones, and ever since then I have avoided the sort of pretentious restaurants in which the equally pretentious food is likely to have been handled by - let’s not be afraid to say it - various mucky fingers.
Masterchef is a interesting and entertaining programme. But where are the most basic of hygiene procedures? Where are the hats to stop greasy hair falling onto food? Where are the disposable gloves? The producers of this programme need to start enforcing some basic hygiene procedures!
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