In an episode of Food Skills on First We Feast, the ‘Carrera Brothers’ share an intimate yet illuminating view into their Tortilla Empire.

Welcome to the new age of culinary awareness, especially when having to do with business transparency, & food production mixed with the integration of social media like YouTube or Instagram, & technology. Many of us find some of these moments of clarity or discovery hard to believe or accept. For some people, that time is going to be now reading this Article about a Tortilla factory in Brooklyn. It's not our pleasure to fire off this material but health precautions when dealing with food packaging is very important, coming from lovers of Mexican food & culture.

A coveted Brooklyn tortilla factory named Mi Barrio Tortilleria owned by Miguel and Nelson Carrera gave a special, emotional, yet risky tour of their culinary world to First We Feast. It’s located in what’s called “The Tortilla Triangle” in Bushwick, Brooklyn and it is one of only a few tortilla factories left that manufactures and distributes tortillas shells in this what use to be epicenter of Brooklyn. With that being said, the company honorably carries a large demanded weight for NYC when it comes to Mexican Cuisine.

Here we're focused on the the product that goes under the brand name of ‘Piaxtla’ in which Owners Miguel and Nelson Carrera says produces tons of tortillas a day, “hundreds of thousands” as said by the narrator in the video.  

In multiple stages of the production process, the tortilla’s are being handled without Sanitary & Health precautions more specifically without gloves (cough cough, contamination). Hand Hygiene and Food Safety should be taken extremely serious especially when packaging and delivering these kinds of products on mass scales. Washing your hands eliminates bacteria but doesn’t alleviate the cross-contamination of what's touched after you’ve washed them. The hands can still secrete microscopic germs after you’ve washed them and basically germs can lead to disease. 

The before struggling family business of a 10-year history is thriving now yet doesn’t seem to be aware of the establishment by the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.  State Food Safety reports “Over fifteen years ago, the NACMCF concluded that bare hand contact with food contributes greatly to the transmission of foodborne illness. Employees can very easily shed viral pathogens if they are infected, and they can shed these pathogens even before they realize they are sick. Most of these pathogens have a low infective dose, meaning that people don’t have to ingest many of them before they start to get sick. The FDA decided that handwashing alone is not sufficient to prevent transmitting these pathogens. That’s why using gloves is so important! It provides another barrier between potentially dangerous pathogens and the food the worker is preparing. This is especially important when preparing foods that will not go through a cooking step before it reaches the customer.” 

What’s alarming about the visuals here, are the different stages in which this unhealthy practice of not wearing gloves can be seen. In the video you can see that the chiefs who make the dishes that involve the tortillas ARE wearing gloves in every shot as they should. Yet the production and packaging team are also chiefs in their particular way. The only people who shouldn’t have to worry about handling the food without gloves are the people who are stuffing it into their digestive systems.

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