Your stomach might churn, or you might think “eww!” when you watch Meghan Markle and her special guest Chrissy Teigen make dough for cheesy crackers in the second episode of the new season of “With Love, Meghan,” the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix lifestyle and cooking show.
That’s because Teigen gets her fingers into a glass bowl to hand-mix together flour, butter, cheddar cheese and Meghan’s homemade sourdough starter, and you can see the model’s long, dagger-like fingernails, polished a bright red, slice and dig their way through the raw dough.
You’d like to think that Teigen would have at least scrubbed around those fingernails before she put her hands into the dough, in order to remove the dirt and bacteria that is known to accumulate under long nails. But no hand-washing or scrubbing is seen prior to the influencer’s fingernails coming into contact with the raw dough, at around 11 minutes and 30 seconds into the episode. Meghan also gets her fingers into raw dough earlier in the episode, which also could be a bit of an “eww” moment. While Meghan’s fingernails are shorter than Teigen’s red daggers, they appear to be painted with a pale, clear polish.
The thing is, if these two self-styled cooking mavens worked in a restaurant, they’d likely be barred from getting their fingers anywhere near food, or “food-contact surfaces,” if they were wearing nail polish or had fingernails “that are not clean, smooth, or neatly trimmed.” That’s according to California’s Health and Safety Code 113973, which would presumably apply in Santa Barbara County, where Meghan’s show is filmed in a kitchen that’s not really hers.
Sure, the set for Meghan’s faux kitchen is not a restaurant, so state hygiene standards probably don’t apply. Still, those standards could be a model for lifestyle influencers like Meghan and Teigen, as they have themselves filmed cooking for the entertainment of the masses. The health and safety code also says that single-use, non-latex gloves must be worn by employees with nail polish, or with “sores, rashes, artificial nails, nail polish, rings, other than a plain ring, such as a wedding band, and uncleanable orthopedic support devices.”
Alas, it’s hard to imagine that either Teigen or Meghan would want to cover up their pricey manicures and bejeweled fingers with utilitarian food-service gloves.
It’s also not likely that Teigen, Meghan or Meghan’s Netflix producers would take advice from a self-described former pastry chef, who recently addressed the issue of having long fingernails in a professional setting on the r/Baking sub-Reddit. The former pastry chef admonished a new bakery assistant who said she wanted to keep her long, fake, almond-shaped nails but was worried they would tear through any food-prep gloves she wore.
The former pastry chef told the new bakery assistant to “please ditch the nails.”
“The amount of bacteria and dirt that can be trapped under long nails is pretty gross and if (you’re) handling raw dough like bread dough it will literally get up under there and pull that nastiness out into the item that someone else is going to eat,” the former pastry chef wrote. “You don’t want to be responsible for making a child, elderly person, or cancer patient very sick.”
“If I owned a bakery I would never allow long nails or nail polish, just like anyone with long hair has to wear it tied back and some type of cap/hat,” the former pastry chef concluded. Speaking of long hair not being tied back, tendrils of Meghan’s long hair also dangles uncomfortably close to the counter as she prepares some raw sourdough for baking.
Aside from the fingernail issue, the new season of “With Love, Meghan” was met with mixed reactions when it dropped Tuesday. People who liked the debut season of “With Love, Meghan” will probably “love the second,” said Tom Sykes, the European editor of the Daily Beast. “If you hated the first, you’ll find plenty to loathe in the sequel.” .
According to the headline for Sykes’ review, “Meghan Markle’s Show Returns for Another Season of Carefully Curated Inauthenticity.”
Sykes, first off, points out that these Season 2 episodes were filmed at the same time as Season 1, which debuted in the spring. The episodes moreover were taped at a home and in a garden in Montecito that is not the mansion that Meghan shares with Prince Harry and their two young children, so that adds to the show’s problem with “authenticity.”
The arrival of Season 2 follows news that Netflix is not renewing its reported five-year, $100 million production deal with Meghan and Harry. The streaming service is staying in business with the couple. But instead of paying them upfront to essentially be on retainer, Netflix will hear pitches from the couple and will only pay if it chooses to produce their ideas.
Meanwhile, the new episodes of Season “veer between the banal and the baffling,” according to Sykes. When it comes to “baffling,” Meghan’s episode with Teigen starts off with the former TV actor making some strange timing choices as she prepares treats for her guest’s arrival.
Meghan excitedly mixes up two glasses of Thai iced tea, no doubt in honor of Teigen’s Thai heritage, but then sets the glasses aside on the counter for however many minutes. As the ice presumably melts in the glass, Meghan is then seen going through the fuss of toasting slices of her sourdough bread. To make a tartine, she takes some more time to grate lemon zest into a mix of ricotta cheese and honey to put on top of the toast.
A bit later on, while Teigen is digging those fingernails into the raw dough, she and Meghan talk about making dinner for their families. Teigen reveals that she likes to spend hours making dinner for her musician husband, John Legend, and their four children. “Comfort recipes,” Teigen explains. “That take like four hours. I don’t do fast recipes. I need to braise.”
“Wow, that’s so fascinating,” Meghan replies.
“Fascinating” is a word that actually comes up in a review by Lucy Mangan at The Guardian. She calls the show “so boring, so contrived, so effortfully whimsical that, do you know what? In the end, it does become almost fascinating.”