[netcoyote]

I expect disposable gloves would have worked, but they weren't provided, and as a naive 17-year old I was way too dumb to ask.

For reference on my stupidity, around the same time I mixed chlorine bleach and hydrogen peroxide to make a stronger cleaning agent and independently discovered that chlorine gas is really nasty stuff! Wow -- only did that once!

It wasn't all bad. Several times I got to fill a 2'x2'x3' bin with strawberries after cutting off the bad bits, and ate several pounds of them each time. For non-Americans, that's around 40 kilos, but as an American I don't know much about the metric system, so that might be a few grams off :)