When you work in commercial food service, they tell you to take off all of your jewelry.
For safety, they say. So, should you do the same when you cook in your own kitchen at
home? In a perfect world, yeah, but in the real world, I think it depends what you’re
cooking, and it depends what kind of jewelry. Most of the time, I feel just fine cooking
in my plain wedding band. That's just the opinion of a guy in his kitchen with a camera,
but it is an opinion that's based on science.
First thing to know is that the big risk with cooking in jewelry is not that germs can hide
up in there. I mean, they can, but that’s not the big risk. Says who? Says Dr. Francisco
Diez-Gonzalez, the director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.
“The main recommendation why we try to avoid jewelry is because what we refer in our field
as ‘physical hazards.’ There are physical, biological and chemical hazards…”
…and germs would be a biological hazard. By physical hazard, what he’s talking about
is you dropping your ring into the soup and then a somebody chomping down on it. That’s
mostly what they’re worried about with jewelry.
“You’re gonna be liable for whatever happens to their teeth. Or if they ingest it, that’s
a worse thing.”
And in a commercial setting, this is a real risk. You could be stirring around some giant
vat of sauce or something, drop an earring in, you'd never notice and you'd certainly
never find it again. But at home, and with a ring, the situation might be different.
“Let’s say if you’re wearing your ring and you’re cooking for yourself, you’re
gonna realize that you lose your ring the moment that you’re trying — that you’re
gonna be eating. So that way you can check whether you lost it.”
Right, like this.
If you’re just cooking a little sauce for yourself, you’re gonna notice that foreign
body swimming around in there and you're gonna be able to fish it out just fine.
But if you’re cooking at home for a lot of people, maybe stirring around some big
pot of sauce, yeah, you could maybe lose something in there, and that’s a situation where maybe
you should take everything off.
Especially things like necklaces or dangly bracelets, things that could get caught on
something, or where you might not notice when they fall off.
A ring, I think, is different. After a dozen years of marriage, I really notice when this
thing comes off. My whole nervous system seems to perceive it when this is not on my finger,
so I’m not really worried about losing this and not noticing.
And check out the U.S. federal food safety code, which regulates commercial food service
in the United States. It forbids workers from wearing jewelry “except for a plain ring
such as a wedding band.” The feds explicitly allow you to wear a plain ring! That’s as
opposed to a ring with a stone in it that really could fall out and break somebody’s
tooth.
Also, some research does suggest that a plain ring could harbor fewer germs, probably because
there aren't so many nooks and crannies in there where goo could get stuck.
And let’s talk about germs. In 2004, Nigerian researchers swabbed a whole bunch of different
kinds of jewelry, like necklaces and wristwatches, and they found that rings actually had, by
far, the lowest bacterial loads.
There isn’t much research on whether rings spread germs on the hands of food service
workers. But there is a ton of research on whether they spread germs on the hands of
healthcare workers.
Several studies do indicate that doctors and nurses who wear rings have more germs on their
hands than those who don't.
But “more” doesn’t necessarily mean dangerous.
I mean, think about it. Two pennies is literally twice as much money as one penny, and yet
neither quantity is enough money to buy you a damn thing.
In a 2008 study from the U.K., researchers had a bunch of married doctors scrub-in for
surgery with their rings on. They took some samples, and then they watched to see if those
samples would grow into dangerous bacterial colonies.
Their conclusion? “The wedding ring is not a significant source of microbes sufficient
to warrant its removal prior to any surgical procedure.”
Now, mind you, that’s after a surgical scrub, which as you can see in this demo from Johns
Hopkins is a way more intense hand-washing procedure than what you or I would just do
at the sink before we cook.
There is a 2007 study where subjects just did a normal hand-washing with sanitizer.
For those people who used an alcohol-based sanitizer, “there was no significant difference
in the number of bacteria between hands with and hands without rings.” When they used
another kind of sanitizer, there actually was a difference. So use the stuff with alcohol
in it.
For all of these reasons, I feel pretty fine about cooking with my ring on most of the
time, as long as I’m not cooking for an immunosuppressed person, you know, somebody
undergoing cancer treatment.
Dr. Diez did not scold me for that, though he did caution:
“If you’re handling, especially, raw meat, definitely you need to remove everything.”
Because you could get some particularly dangerous germs under your ring that way, and then you
might turn around and spread them to foods that aren’t gonna get cooked before you
eat them.
Like when I cut up my steak and toss it in its own juices. Yeah, it’s cooked, but we're
not gonna cook it again between now and when we eat it, so when I do this, I do take my
ring off.
Now, you do whatever is safest for your unique situation. As always, my sources are in the
description, and you can make up your own Beyoncé joke about how I better be sure to
put this back on.