IF YOUR grandmother never told you the five-second rule it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t work. So you can stop worrying – or start worrying, depending on your outlook.
“The five-second rule says that if you drop food on the floor and pick it up within five seconds you can still eat it.”
Ever heard that? No, granny never told you? Maybe she forgot. Maybe she dropped her jam sandwich and waited to see. Zillions of bacteria scrambled aboard in the extra seconds, she got dreadfully ill and departed from us sooner than she might have liked. Dr Donald Cutler of the school of biological and chemical sciences at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) and his research associates dropped onto a kitchen floor, a carpet and a street respectively, the following edible morsels: a pizza, a piece of toast (butter-side down) and an apple.
“The three items were taken to the lab for testing,” we are told, which cannot be correct unless pizza, toast and apple were dropped three times each in kitchen, lounge and street. Take it that our scientists equipped themselves with at least three slices of pizza, three slices of buttered toast and three slices of apple and dropped at least one of each at each of the chosen sites. “A day later, all three items showed themselves to be covered in bacteria.” Even the pizza from the kitchen floor had evidence of “faecal bacteria” on it. Disgusting?
What does Wiki tell us? “There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water; in all, there are approximately five nonillion (5×10 to the 30th) bacteria on Earth, forming a biomass that exceeds that of all plants and animals.”
Stay calm and eat your lunch.
Truth is that we are all born with an arsenal of defences passed into our bloodstream from our mothers. Crawling through the ocean of bacteria in our homes, frequently sampling our fingers, we reinforce our resistance by collecting zillions of microgoggas all our own long before we can even reach the kitchen counter. But you are going to feel better about yourself if you can arrange for your toast to hit the kitchen floor or the carpet jam side up. Munch, munch.
Today’s Chiel is Gavin Stewart:
Granny’s rule counted out
“The five-second rule says that if you drop food on the floor and pick it up within five seconds you can still eat it.”
Ever heard that? No, granny never told you? Maybe she forgot. Maybe she dropped her jam sandwich and waited to see. Zillions of bacteria scrambled aboard in the extra seconds, she got dreadfully ill and departed from us sooner than she might have liked. Dr Donald Cutler of the school of biological and chemical sciences at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) and his research associates dropped onto a kitchen floor, a carpet and a street respectively, the following edible morsels: a pizza, a piece of toast (butter-side down) and an apple.
“The three items were taken to the lab for testing,” we are told, which cannot be correct unless pizza, toast and apple were dropped three times each in kitchen, lounge and street. Take it that our scientists equipped themselves with at least three slices of pizza, three slices of buttered toast and three slices of apple and dropped at least one of each at each of the chosen sites. “A day later, all three items showed themselves to be covered in bacteria.” Even the pizza from the kitchen floor had evidence of “faecal bacteria” on it. Disgusting?
What does Wiki tell us? “There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water; in all, there are approximately five nonillion (5×10 to the 30th) bacteria on Earth, forming a biomass that exceeds that of all plants and animals.”
Stay calm and eat your lunch.
Truth is that we are all born with an arsenal of defences passed into our bloodstream from our mothers. Crawling through the ocean of bacteria in our homes, frequently sampling our fingers, we reinforce our resistance by collecting zillions of microgoggas all our own long before we can even reach the kitchen counter. But you are going to feel better about yourself if you can arrange for your toast to hit the kitchen floor or the carpet jam side up. Munch, munch.
Today’s Chiel is Gavin Stewart:
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