Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Yum, who’s hungry for a slice of cake loaded with bacteria? A chip dipped in both salsa and bacteria? Mmm, what about a piece of toast that just fell on the bacteria-covered floor?

Getting some bacteria with your food is the risk you take if you eat birthday cake after the candles have been blown out, dip a chip in salsa after someone else double-dips or eat toast that has fallen on the floor – yes, even just for five seconds.

Paul Dawson, a food scientist and professor at Clemson University, has made it his mission for 30 years to understand how our common food habits may be increasing the spread of bacteria. Of course, the risk of becoming ill is typically low, but swapping bacteria through food can increase the chances.

How many of these are you guilty of?

The double-dip: At one point in an iconic “Seinfeld” episode, George Costanza takes a bite of a chip filled with dip. When he goes for more dip with the same chip, he is quickly confronted about “double-dipping.” “That’s like putting your whole mouth right in the dip!” another character says.

Five seconds on the floor

Urban legend says that if you pick up dropped food from the floor within five seconds, it’s safe to eat, because it is not enough time for contamination to take place.

Dawson and his students set out to understand the truth behind this food trope.

They spread salmonella bacteria on tile, carpet and wood. After five minutes, they put down bologna or bread and left it there for five, 30 or 60 seconds. They did the same thing after bacteria had been on the surface for two, four, eight and 24 hours.

The worst party favour: germs

Blowing out candles on a birthday cake is a tradition that some scholars say dates to ancient Greece. But because your mouth contains bacteria that can spread through blowing, the practice is pretty dirty.

Dawson discovered that when candles are blown out on a cake, there was 1400% – or 15 times – more bacteria on the frosting than on frosting with candles that were not blown out.

Mind the popcorn hands: Sharing a bowl of popcorn at movies, sporting events, fairs and concerts is common practice. And it seems to carry only a very low risk of bacterial transmission.

Dawson and his team spread a noninfectious E coli strain on people’s hands and then measured how much was transferred to the popcorn they picked up and the kernels left in the bowl. Though they observed that bacteria transferred to both the popcorn in the hand and the popcorn in the bowl, the rate of transfer was only 0.2% and 0.0009%, respectively. Of 136 tests, 24 resulted in no bacterial transfer to the popcorn at all.

Not-so-refreshing drink: You might want to think again after telling a waiter that you would like a lemon in your ice water. In restaurants, lemons are often left in open containers at room temperature, where anyone can access them, and are sometimes refrigerated overnight and used the next day to reduce waste. Food workers also may not always have clean hands when handling lemons. And depending on where ice is stored and how it’s picked up, it can contain bacteria, too.

Checking out the menu: As soon as you sit down at a restaurant, the waiter hands over a menu. You flip through all the pages and check out the back to make sure you don’t miss anything delicious. But those restaurant menus are often not washed and can be another culprit in the spread of bacteria.

After collecting random samples of local restaurant menus and testing them for bacteria, Dawson and his team discovered that for the most part, there were low numbers of bacteria living on them. At busier restaurant times, higher numbers of bacteria were on menus than in less busy periods.

Published in Daily Times, December 18th 2017.