Chef Doug Ganhs is frequently appalled by the crimes against food safety he sees on TV cooking shows.

That doesn’t keep him from watching, mind you. He has a professional interest, and a particular admiration for the skills of Gordon Ramsay, who seems to host half the prime time programs on Fox.

Even in a household like mine, though, where we refer to the kitchen as “the reheating room,” we watch a surprising number of kitchen competitions. And even as someone who doesn’t always rinse his grapes, I often find myself thinking, “Isn’t there a health code about that? Or an international treaty?”

So I called Ganhs, an instructor as well as the department chair at the renowned Oakland Community College culinary arts program, to see whether we’re really seeing a recipe for disaster.

Um, yeah, he said.

“I understand it’s the power of TV. I get it,” he said. “But at the end of the day, a lot of young culinarians watch these shows, and I don’t want them to pick up bad habits.”

As a general rule, hands go unwashed, though surely there’s some scrubbing done off-camera. Hair is uncovered. The same cutting board that’s used for chicken might be used later for strawberries or, I dunno, Roundup.

On a standard episode of Ramsay’s “MasterChef” on Wednesday, July 9, with five teams of two preparing desserts, long hair dangled in front of a cook’s shoulder above a chocolate ganache. Bare hands on other teams pushed hair back in place, then went back to baking.

A wife wiped her husband’s face with a dish towel that was presumably quickly discarded, but if so, we didn’t see proof. One of the women making cannoli so poorly that they didn’t survive the episode — they were eliminated, I should make clear, not exterminated — wore a nose ring, theoretically prohibited in Michigan and multiple other states.

The competition was, as always and as edited, intense. Teams worked feverishly through the final countdown. Five, four, three, two, one, zero gloves in sight.

“All of us chefs know the bare hand is the most dangerous tool in the kitchen,” Ganhs said.

He’s not suggesting that we use ours to wave bye-bye to “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Yes, Chef!” and the rest, but he’d like to at least use an index finger to point out basic precautions.

Waiter, there’s a hoop in my soup

Ganhs, 54, of Howell, grew up in Port Huron and quickly found his way to the Culinary Institute of America in New York.

There, he acquired a splendid education and a load of debt that makes him particularly appreciative of strong community college programs like Schoolcraft’s, Macomb’s and his, with its $74 million addition scheduled to open for fall semester.

Among his head chef positions across the years was one at Country Club of Detroit, where an early day in his tenure found him at a table explaining why a little piece of a stainless steel scrubby pad was part of someone’s dinner.

As a customer, he said, his meals have contained staples, bits of cleaning pads and pieces of plastic.

“That was pretty disgusting,” he said, but in a fast-paced restaurant, odd things will happen.

That’s why it’s important, he said, to both follow established guidelines and share acquired wisdom.

Piercings, for instance, should be removed or covered with a plastic bandage, to prevent the spread of bacteria or the plummeting of a nose ring into a vat of soup.

Furthermore, the bandages should be blue, “because it’s not a natural food color. If it falls into a salad, again, that’s disgusting. But you’re much more likely to see it before it gets to a customer.”

Live and learn, and maybe shudder a bit.

A menu of missed opportunities

OCC culinary students are required to enroll in, and ideally complete, a safety certification class before they start school.

Then they tune into their favorite chefs on television and watch the pros and the contestants ignore the curriculum.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst once enlisted five food safety experts to watch 39 episodes from 10 cooking shows and keep tabs on the chefs. Among the raw numbers:

Only 13% of shows mentioned food safety, only 7% included hand-washing, only 9% portrayed proper washing of fresh produce, and 91% included the mishandling of raw food.

“They’re not representing the industry well,” Ganhs said.

The rationale is that the food isn’t meant for public consumption, but food prepared on “Hell’s Kitchen” goes directly to diners in a Ramsay restaurant, and one of the recurring themes on “MasterChef” is two teams feeding large groups who vote on who spoiled them the best.

Gloves, Ganhs conceded, “make things look institutional. They do. They take away a little bit of the onscreen presence.”

He’ll skip them at carving stations, figuring tongs and knives are the only things that actually touch meat. But there’s almost always a pressure point in a cooking show where shaved prunes are being balanced atop arugula on a bed of Madagascar kelp above a cheetah filet, and it’s the handiwork of hands.

Maybe, despite the deadline pressure, the contestants have washed their hands repeatedly. That’s not enough, Ganhs said, when no more heat is going to be applied to chase off bacteria.

“That would be a great opportunity for the host to say, ‘OK, time to get the gloves on,’ ” he said.

Or before that, to say it’s a great time to judge the readiness of meat with a thermometer instead of a fingertip with an overly long nail. Or to be wary of cross-contamination. Or to make sure the cheetah was farm-raised, and died of natural causes.

Fat chance. But Chef Ganhs will keep hoping, and keep grading.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.