Washing without a tap
Every safety page on this site ends up, somewhere, at the same instruction: wash your hands. The flour page quotes it, the tins page relies on it, and the cooling page assumes it. All of that advice was written for a kitchen with warm running water, and most of the cooking this site is about happens somewhere without one.
That gap is worth taking seriously, because hygiene failures do not announce themselves as hygiene failures. They arrive two days later as something you blame on the food.
The thing hand gel will not do
Start here, because it is the belief most likely to cause a problem.
Alcohol hand sanitiser does not work against norovirus. NHS England:
Hand sanitisers and alcohol gel will work against some bacteria and flu viruses but they will not protect you against Norovirus. During Norovirus outbreaks we ask people to wash their hands instead of using hand sanitiser.
Source: NHS England, Play your part this winter to stop the spread of Norovirus
Norovirus is the campsite, festival and shared-facilities illness. It needs a very small dose, it survives on surfaces, and it is precisely the situation where a bottle of gel in a pocket feels like a system and is not.
Gel also does poorly on hands that are visibly dirty or greasy, which away from a sink is most of the time.
So gel is a supplement. Soap and water is the system, and the rest of this page is about how to have soap and water when there is no tap.
What soap is actually doing
The FSA is clear that the soap, not the water, is the active part, and that warmth helps it work:
You can use cold water to wash your hands, as this will still clean them, however, using warm water is better
the soap/detergent lathers up more, which makes it more effective at removing bacteria
Two useful conclusions. Cold water and soap is a real wash, not a token one, so a cold rinse before handling food is worth doing rather than skipping. And warming a small amount of water is worth the fuel when you are about to make something with your hands, like flatbread dough.
A washing setup that works
The whole thing is one container with a tap and something to catch the runoff.
- A container with a tap set at the edge of a table gives you running water, which is what makes a twenty-second wash possible. Washing from a poured jug needs two people or two hands you do not have.
- Concentrated soap rather than a bar, which goes soft, collects grit and needs somewhere to drain.
- Something to dry on that is actually dry. A damp towel undoes the wash. Carry more cloths than feels necessary and rotate them.
Warm water costs a pan and two minutes on the burner. On the days you are handling dough or raw ingredients, spend it.
Washing up on a few litres
A running tap is the enemy here. A collapsible bowl turns the job into whatever the bowl holds, and two bowls, one to wash and one to rinse, stops you rinsing in detergent.
Order matters and saves water: least dirty to most dirty. Cups and cutlery, then plates, then the pan. Reversing that means changing the water halfway.
Use a brush rather than a sponge. A brush dries; a sponge stays wet in a locker and becomes the dirtiest thing you own. Get the worst of the food off with a scraper or a piece of kitchen paper before anything goes in the water, because the water is the resource you are protecting.
Scatter the waste water well away from any watercourse and from anywhere anyone draws water, whatever the bottle says about being biodegradable. Biodegradable means it breaks down in soil, given soil to break down in.
Clean is not the same as disinfected
The distinction that is worth carrying a second bottle for:
Detergents clean the surface and remove grease, but they do not kill bacteria or viruses
Disinfectants kill bacteria and viruses, but should be used on a visibly clean surface
The order is fixed: clean, then disinfect. Spraying sanitiser on a dirty table accomplishes almost nothing, and most disinfectants need to stay wet for a stated contact time, so wiping it straight off wastes it.
This matters more in a van than in a house, because a camp table is the chopping board, the dining table, the workbench and the place the muddy things went. A kitchen separates those jobs by accident of layout. A single table does not.
The short version
- Gel is a supplement. It does nothing against norovirus.
- Soap is the active ingredient; cold water still works, warm works better.
- A container with a tap is what makes a proper wash possible at all.
- Wash up in a bowl, least dirty first, with a brush that dries.
- Clean before you disinfect, and let the disinfectant sit.