If you drop your chili dog at a Fourth of July event, will it be okay to pick it up and eat it within five seconds?
It all depends. Here are some surprising upgraded rules about food-droppage from Glamour Magazine and Daily Mail.
According to a research team, dropped dry foods (cookies, dry toast, biscuits) rarely pick up bacteria, unless aliens or three-year-olds left mysterious deposits into which your food plopped.
While dry foods are pretty safe, chili dogs – not so much. The chili’s moisture could sponge up whatever’s on the floor. But the amount of floor-time and the condition of that floor are important factors.
There is another aspect not mentioned in Glamour’s Aston University’s study.
Marie, a friend, shared this story. She recently returned from a mission-trip to Tanzania. There, she fell in love with the Maasai, a semi-nomadic tribe who herd cattle from waterhole to well to mountain stream, depending upon seasonal rain. Water and cattle are the core of their survival.
Marie said the Maasai leave early in the day herding their cattle to pasture. At day’s end, thirsty cows and drovers return, heading for the water trough. Side-by-side, cow and man slurp up water. Is it sanitary? Marie said it’s probably juiced up with bacteria and microbes that hang out routinely in the Maasai gut. It’s a bacterial soup essential to the tribe, and they manage it just fine.
The point of this story: genetics and culture matter in food-consumption.
Back to your chili dog. Stickier food probably will absorb bacteria depending on how clean the floor is. Floors mopped every week are much safer than those rarely mopped. According to the study, food dropped on your home floor is pretty safe, like the Massai’s water trough is safe to them.
But there’s always a chance something goes awry, so use caution. Then again, I’ve watched my four grandsons eat everything from questionable mushrooms plucked from the back yard to soft drinks left in a parking lot, and they’ve managed to get to high school healthy as an ox – or, for that matter, a Maasai bull.
So Happy Fourth. Throw that dropped chili dog in the trash and let some rummaging crow with the gut of iron enjoy whatever you left. He’ll be raven-ous.
Artwork by Norma Jean Zahner
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