Posh dinner at my house. We don't usually bother with the plates. Photo by Chris Bethell.The “five-second rule” – that unwritten mantra usually squealed by a wide-eyed child as they pick a crisp off the pavement and stuff it in their mouth – decrees that if a piece of food is dropped on the floor it can be picked up and eaten within five seconds before any germs transfer onto it. Last week, it was actually proved to have some scientific foundation. According to a new study from Aston University in Birmingham, the kids have been right all along. Of course they have.
Annons
This study, led by microbiology professor Anthony Hilton and a team of final year biology students, looked at the transfer of E.coli and Staphylococcus aureus (the one that causes Staph infection) from a whole spectrum of floor types – laminate, tiles, carpet – and a variety of foods – ham, dried fruit, toast, biscuits, pasta, sticky puddings. They tested each food, on each surface, with contact ranging between three and 30 seconds. They found that not only is time a significant factor in the transfer of bacteria from a floor surface to a piece of food, but it also depends on the type of floor it lands on. Turns out that carpet is least likely to transfer bugs, but if anything sits on a hardwood floor for over five seconds then it’s almost guaranteed that things will climb on. And if you drop wet food and pick it up? The researchers found out that you need to have a serious look at your life, mate.They also found that, out of 87 percent of people who they surveyed who said they’d eat food from the floor, 55 percent were women. I am, proudly, one of those women. I’m not about to put two fingers up to science – I already did that once turning my back on a medicine degree – but I’ve been eating food off the floor and other questionable surfaces my entire life. And to my knowledge, I've never been ill from it.Eating off the floor is a prerequisite of being a kid, but, as a teenager, I applied the same laissez-faire attitude to the surfaces I plucked my food from when I waitressed in the only high-end restaurant in my hometown (Bishop's Stortford, since you’re asking.). Here, my friends and I would merrily feed ourselves by swiping half-eaten terrines, smoked haddock goujons, chips, wobbly, arse-like panna cottas and slicks of partially congealed crème anglaise from people’s plates into our mouths by the pot-wash. It was absolute bliss. If a diner dropped their buttered bread on the floor do you think we’d bin it and not carefully slip it into our apron to eat out the back before bringing them more? Would we fuck.Those years were, without question, some of the finest of my life and I’ve carried the same food waste mantra through: I just don’t – can’t – do it. We waste too much food. If I’m cooking and something falls out of the pot, it’s going back in. If I’m walking around Westfield eating sushi off a tray and drop a bit beside the bins? It’s still going in my mouth. I can’t look at something I’ve paid for lying there looking pathetic. It’s probably a bit pathological but who cares? Although I’m not about to go around pecking at breadcrumbs left by a park bench like a pigeon, I live by a no-second rule.The reasoning behind this rule is very simple: I believe in the human body. Someone has to. These big, fleshy cases we’re born in must be capable of fending off the doses of potentially harmful bacteria that Hilton and his team speak of, or else, surely, loads of us would just be ill all the time? Putting me and my equally rank friends aside for a second – I have one who will lie one half of a sandwich naked on the ground, any ground, while she eats the other half – surely, when you consider just how much bacteria there is on every single surface we touch (pin pads, keyboards, phones, mugs, handrails, lift buttons, water machines, printers, hand-dryers), which then transfer onto our food without us knowing, every single day, should eating something that’s been on the floor for more than five seconds really have us shitting ourselves about whether we might, in fact, shit ourselves later on? I don’t think so.You’re not “safe” eating from a plate you’ve taken from the cupboard in your office kitchen because, for all you know, someone might have touched that stack of plates before you with specks of dog shit on their hands because they’d taken their shoes off for some reason. See? This kind of thinking breeds paranoia. Not bacteria. Most people are exposed to all kinds of horrible stuff and our bodies just deal with it. So I’ll ignore the science, cheers, and continue eating my food from the floor like an animal. Even if it’s wet.@eleanormorgan
