The Importance of Hand Washing in the Kitchen

Food handlers’ unwashed hands can quickly spread invisible infectious organisms into ready-to-eat products, thus necessitating laws limiting direct hand contact between their bare hands and such foods and mandating proper handwashing by food workers.

Rinse and lather your hands thoroughly with hot, soapy water to remove dirt, debris, and oil build-up on their surfaces. Ensure to include the backs of hands, between fingers, and under nails when cleaning hands thoroughly.

Wash Your Hands

Hand washing in the kitchen is one of the most essential tasks, preventing germs from spreading on food and equipment while you prepare it. Proper handwashing techniques will help protect you against food poisoning while keeping yourself and your loved ones healthy.

You should wash your hands with clean running water and apply plenty of soap and scrub them well. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), lathering and washing your hands for at least 20 seconds should suffice; many songs feature choruses that last approximately a long time as an easy timer.

CDC recommendations also encourage individuals to regularly wash their hands when handling food, particularly before eating it. Furthermore, washing hands after using the bathroom, changing a diaper, caring for a sick person or animal, blowing your nose or coughing, and touching their faces or hair is also strongly encouraged.

With ServSafe training, you will be taught the necessary steps for safe and effective handwashing. These include wetting your hands with clean running water before applying soap and lathering them together into a rich lather; then scrubber backs of your hands up to wrists between fingers and under nails, thoroughly scrubbing under nails, rinsing thoroughly with warm water before drying your hands on a clean cloth or paper towel.

Wear Gloves

As food workers know, gloves help minimize the risk of contaminating ready-to-eat foods with harmful pathogens. Unfortunately, gloves cannot replace proper handwashing since many employees touch objects other than food while wearing their gloves, including the bathroom, garbage cans, chemicals, etc., which may then transfer bacteria directly onto their hands and food products. Furthermore, some employees don’t change them often enough.

When changing gloves, hold onto the cuff with one hand while taking steps to remove them, turning them inside out quickly. Wash your hands immediately once the gloves have been taken off.

Nitrile gloves are one of the most widely-used materials used for food prep work, as they’re hypoallergenic, flexible, and robust – and easier to put on and take off between tasks, reducing cross-contamination risks. If possible, opt for powder-free varieties of nitrile gloves to minimize allergies.

A glove-use meeting is an ideal topic to cover in a stand-up meeting. Provide your staff with a checklist to rate their glove use habits (changing gloves before and after certain food preparation activities, washing hands properly, etc), then allow for questions and discussions between staff as needed. Also, show the Glove Changing video above so they can see it correctly done; this may help them recall its steps when they need to do it themselves.

Disinfect Your Hands

Hand washing is the single most effective way to avoid food-borne illness. Please wash your hands before and after handling raw meat or poultry and its packaging, flour, eggs, dairy products, seafood, or other foodstuffs containing bacteria or pathogens. Furthermore, it’s also crucial that you wash your hands after visiting the bathroom, touching a sick person, changing a diaper, cleaning surfaces, or coughing/sneezing/blowing your nose!

Saturate your hands with clean running water (warm or cold), apply soap, rub your hands together to form a lather, then scrub all areas of your hands, including between fingers, under fingernails, and wrists, for 20 seconds to rid yourself of germs – research shows this helps people wash more correctly than traditional methods alone! Sing “Happy Birthday” or another similar song to keep time, and then rinse well under clean running water and dry them with a paper towel or cloth afterward.

If you don’t have running water access, use a commercial or homemade hand sanitizer containing at least 60 percent alcohol. Apply a dime-size amount of product onto palms and fingers before spreading evenly across surfaces such as between fingers or under fingernails – following the manufacturer’s instructions regarding application and rinsing afterward.

Dry Your Hands

Wet hands transmit germs more readily than dry ones, so washing and drying hands regularly are crucial to avoid illness and spreading infection. But hand drying also remains vital as an element of illness prevention.

Before touching anything that could come in contact with food, it’s crucial to thoroughly wash and dry your hands in either a public or home bathroom setting. Wash for at least 20 seconds using a designated hand sink, ensuring all areas, including under the fingernails and between fingers, have been washed off, then rinse your hands before drying them with either a paper towel (not cloth) or an air dryer to avoid reinfecting them.

Hand sanitizer containing at least 60 percent alcohol can provide an ideal alternative to washing your hands when soap and water are unavailable. Apply a dime-sized amount to the palms and backs of both hands, rub together for 30 seconds, and cover all surfaces, including fingers, fingertips, and under the nails, with it for an effective hand cleansing solution.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought widespread attention to correctly washing hands, with the guidance published by WHO, CDC, and NHS, but less on effectively drying them afterward – an equally critical task. Research indicates that frictional drying using paper towels is highly effective as friction physically removes microorganisms from your hands and paper towels.