Don’t take five
By Eric Wilkins, Staff Writer
We’ve all been there. One moment you’re happily munching away on a piece of pizza and the next, your delicious slice of sustenance has taken an unfortunate fall to the floor. You have to think fast at that point. Are you going to snatch it up, simultaneously throwing away any chance you thought you might have with that cute girl across the room? Or call a spade a spade and give up the pizza as a lost cause?
If you chose the first option, props to you for your devotion to food. But you’ve made the wrong decision: the five-second rule is, sadly, nothing more than a hopeful myth. Food left on the floor for five seconds can pick up anywhere from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. The only truth to the myth seems to be that the faster you recover said dropped food, the less bacteria will have accumulated (apparently that figure increases tenfold if left for a full minute).
Think it’s alright just because the floor looks clean and dry? Think again. A study by the University of Arizona revealed that approximately 90 per cent of shoes have fecal matter on them. It’s all about sole.
While there may be some truth to the theory that eating food off of the floor helps build one’s immune system, that’s no excuse to put the janitor’s skills to the ultimate test. You drop it, you bye it.
