March 29, 2024
Columns | Bureau County Republican


Columns

Pea!!!

The news can be hard to swallow. Several times this past week, I heard stories discussing a scientific study that disputes the validity of the so-called five-second rule. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this rule, it states that if you drop a food product on the floor, you have five seconds to retrieve the morsel before it is contaminated with germs and no good to eat. Scientists have now debunked this unwritten rule. Do we really need science to tell us to not eat floor food?

Donald Shaffner, a food scientist from Rutgers University, conducted this study. Based on the assumption that bacteria needs time to transfer onto food, the five-second rule has been the last bastion of the poor soul who’s a butterfinger with a fork and spoon. “We decided to look into this because the practice is so widespread,” noted Schaffner. I’m starting to feel a little nauseous.

About the study itself, the scientists used watermelon, bread, buttered bread and gummy candy and observed bacteria contamination over a period of one, five, 30 and 300 seconds. A total of 2,560 experimental scenarios were carried out involving a noninfectious “cousin” bacteria to Salmonella, known as Enterobacter aerogenes. During the study, the food was placed onto four different dry surfaces — stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood and carpet — all covered with the bacteria. Did I tell you that I’m starting to feel a little nauseous?

Their findings concluded contamination is basically instantaneous. Once the food hits the floor, it is officially, and now scientifically, “icky.” And in what I find to be an even grosser part of this experiment, the scientists discovered that if you are still looking for an excuse to eat off of the ground, it’s better to consume the morsels off of carpet. Its “low transfer” rate, is the better option when compared with a hard surface, like tile or stainless steel. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I imagine this experiment was conducted on Rutgers’ campus in some sterile laboratory setting with all sorts of “sciency-looking” stuff like Bunsen burners and test tubes made by Pyrex. They probably had to hire test subjects to “drop” the food onto the different surfaces. They really didn’t need to do all that. All they had to do was follow my sister around.

My older sister, I’ll call her “Kathy” to protect her anonymity, has been a food-dropper her entire life. She could have gone professional back in the late 1970s, but she wanted to retain her amateur status for collegiate-scholarship reasons. Kathy has dropped, spilled and vertically abandoned more food in her lifetime than what some third-world countries actually consume. Trust me, I know. I sat by her at the kitchen table for the first 13 years of my life.

It was my self-appointed job to declare loudly to all the others at the table whenever she had a “food incident.” Whenever I noticed something falling off of her fork, I would act like the town crier and shout out, “Hear ye! Hear ye! She did it again!” In reality, she probably didn’t drop any more food than anybody else, but with my constant color commentary, it sure did seem like it.

I remember one fateful day, I had an adventurous pea roll off of my own spoon and fall to the linoleum flooring. Noticing that no one else saw my predicament, with my foot, I slyly maneuvered the errant vegetable under my sister’s chair. At that point, I loudly declared, “Hey! Look! Kathy dropped a pea!”

But alas, my entire family saw through my charade. I had forgotten that it is a well-known fact amongst my family members and most of Northern Illinois, that my sister would not touch a pea if her life depended on it. She hates them. Chili beans too. After that tragic incident, people didn’t seem to pay as much attention to the enormous pile of food under my sister’s chair, and they all looked upon me as the little boy who cried pea.

So, back to my original meandering, all of you clumsy eaters out there, who are still looking for a loophole, yelling “Five-second rule!” every time a Cheeto slips out of your fingers, it will not save your immune system. Stop being gross!

But then again, who am I to tell you how to live your life? I have a dog, and if I drop any food, I rarely have five full seconds to get it back.

You can contact Wallace at gregwallaceink7@gmail.com. You can follow him on his blog at http://gregwallaceink.blogspot.com.