The most depressing sight in the modern world

The most depressing sight in the modern world is that of a man at the primary school sausage sizzle wearing rubber gloves. How have we men let them do this to us? How does this manly activity require surgical garb?

To force a grown man in thongs and t-shirt and shorts to wear a latex skin from wrist to fingertips while he turns the snags is a travesty. This is men saying to the world, we have lost, we are not men any more.

Now I have nothing against rubber gloves. I spend much of my working life wearing them and I am very glad they were invented. Cleaning up bodily fluids doesn’t bother me, but cleaning them up with bare hands would trouble me very much. And I have nothing against the Health Regulations, indeed, I’m sure we owe our lives to them. But do we really need to wear gloves for a barbeque? And does the wearing of rubber gloves make a sausage sizzle a healthier event? Where is the research that proves this?

The big risk with a barbeque, as far as the meat is concerned, is contamination of cooked food by raw food. Raw meat has germs all over it that won’t do you any good if you eat them. Cooking the meat kills the germs and makes the meat safe to eat. But if someone, or some implement, touches the cooked meat after touching the raw meat it can transfer living germs and food poisoning may result. You may have noticed that wearing latex gloves doesn’t make this contamination less likely, in fact it doesn’t really affect it at all.

Meat may also be dangerous to eat if it’s not cooked properly. How do latex gloves influence this? Well, it’s hot work over the big grill, it’s hot and it’s dirty and it’s why we love it. But put latex gloves on us and it ceases to be enjoyably uncomfortable and becomes just plain uncomfortable. We don’t want to stay there any longer than we have to because our hands are sweating inside the rubber. Our hands are feeling like a man’s hands are not meant to feel. So we might become a little careless and not cook the sausages for as long as safety requires. So I would argue that latex gloves make it more likely that the sausages will be undercooked.

Those who drafted the regulations that brought us to this shameful point in our history might say that latex gloves prevent contamination from the hand to the food. All those terrible things that might be on your hand – bits of dirt, flakes of skin – won’t fall off onto the sausages. That’s why gloves are worn at all times. But latex gloves are not necessarily any cleaner than a pair of bare hands. You can run gloved hands through your dirty hair just the same as if they were ungloved. You can wipe your nose with gloved hands and scratch your bum and do any other disgusting thing and carry on cooking. And if the health inspectors come around they’ll nod approvingly and say “good man, gloved hands, excellent work,” and they won’t see what disgusting places those gloves have visited. So the gloves actually provide a false sense of hygiene security.

Enough is enough. At some point we have to say enough with the safety, we demand dignity! It’s time we set men free again and let them wield the barbeque tongs with bare hands. And I promise I’ll wash my hands after going to the toilet.