How clean are my hands? How clean are my hands? It’s a question I ask myself 100 times a day.
Now, I am fortunate enough not to suffer from OCD or a food allergy or intolerance, yet dinner with my family involves me washing my hands more times than any normal man does in a day (or week, for some).
“Why?”, I hear you ask. The answer is simple – cross-contamination. And dinner-time is a playground for this. Picture the scene… I carefully serve my coeliac daughter her dinner, ensuring my gluten-tastic food has not got anywhere near it. I then serve my own dinner. Not that difficult, hey? But now here is comes… my daughter (still being a very small person) needs me to help cut her dinner up. Cue the first hand wash.
We then sit down nicely as a family. As I am a man, I tend to use my fingers as much as my cutlery to eat. It is usually about this time that I realise I have forgotten to get my daughter a drink. Cue wash number two as I now have gluteny fingers again.
I sit back down. Usually about half way through our meal, my daughter, being your average 3-year-old, decides she wants something from my plate. This is obviously a massive no, due to the gluten contents on it. However, she is knowledgeable enough to know which items are gluten free. This means she often requests these bits. Cue the third wash as I get a clean plate and the fresh gluten-free items from the fridge. Again, I sit back at the table to finish dinner.
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Now after our main we often have a tasty treat for dessert. My daughter believes fruit is a treat (she is also quite aware that chocolate is too!), so off I go back to the sink to wash my hands AGAIN before preparing the fruit.
After we eat our desserts, we tidy up and, lo and behold, my hands are covered in gluten again. Crumbs! (Pardon the pun.) So I wash my hands for the fifth and final time so I am able to pick my daughter up and play a game with her. It is amazing how it adds up – and this is just an average tea-time.
The amount I have to wash my hands does not really bother me. Nothing is too much trouble for my little girl. I am, however, buying shares in Carex.
But knowing how careful I have to be makes me question everyone else – from other family members to chefs in the kitchens of restaurants. Are they as careful as I am? Do they understand the consequences if they are not? All I can hope is that people are clued-up and try to prevent cross-contamination.
And that is one of the big reasons Safer Eating is here – to help educate the masses.
By Martin Woodford – totally normal eater (!). Husband and father of coeliacs