Dear Manager at the St. Louis Park Panera,

I think you should have an all employee meeting and remind your team that the disposable gloves worn while preparing food are NOT to protect the employees' hands from getting dirty, but rather to protect the food from being contaminated.

Seriously. What has become of people? Do people not have common sense when it comes to food preparation? Do not prepare food, use your gloved hand to open the dirty kitchen door and go back to food preparation all while wearing the same pair of gloves. I would rather you just not wear gloves at all. Will I continue to eat at Panera, of course, because I love it, but seriously do people not understand why they are wearing gloves?

I must have this conversation with Ryan about once a month. I just don't get it. The gloved hands portray a false sense of cleanliness in the food preparation process and quite frankly I would rather someone who works with food to practice good hand washing techniques than wear dirty gloves. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, "Although single-use gloves can provide additional food protection, they are only effective if placed on properly washed hands and changed at appropriate times during the food operation. The Minnesota Food Code requires that employees limit direct hand contact with food. Wearing gloves is one way to meet this requirement. Single-use gloves are not specifically required unless the employee has a boil, infected wound or other lesion on their hand. In this case, the employee must apply a waterproof bandage and wear a single- use glove or finger cot over the bandage." Perhaps it's not clear enough. I mean I guess I could infer from the first sentence that "additional food protection" was referring to protecting my hands from the food. Maybe people are just that dumb, we did after all recently put a law in place making it illegal to text while driving. Ugh.

Anyway, after our usual discussion of gloves and food preparation, our conversation evolved to what is cheaper - ordering two cups of Chicken and Wild Rice Soup and one Bacon Turkey Bravo or two "You Pick Twos" with a cup of Chicken and Wild Rice Soup and 1/2 a Bacon Turkey Bravo. By this time, we were already in our car and unable to view the menu prices, but we decided that it would be cheaper to get a full sandwich and two cups of soup which Ryan added, "We'd get two cups of soup, two baguettes, a full sandwich, a pickle and a bag of chips. All that and a bag of chips!" Ha ha. Our next visit, we'll have to price it out - it is a tough economy after all. :)

The End.

P.S. The cat is snoring so loud. I can hear him over the hum of the fan and computer. So cute.