Do you eat food you’ve dropped on the floor?

Perhaps  you’ve been told it’s perfectly ok if you’re quick and pick it up within five seconds – before e-coli settles in.   But a couple of years ago, two biology students at Connecticut College tested the five second rule with a series of ingenious series of experiments:  they dropped apple slices and candies on the ground and measured how long it took for dangerous bacteria to cluster == their verdict:  you have 30 seconds to pick up wet food and more than a minute to pick up dry foods.

Now SFoodie, SFWeekly’s food blog, have complexified the eat or not to eat dilemma with this flow chart.

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About Gina Mallet

Gina Mallet is the author of Last Chance to Eat, The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World, which won the 2005 James Beard Award for writing on food, an account of the lost world of eating. She is a former theatre critic, and now the restaurant critic for the National Post of Canada.
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