Overheard at the Free-Ride dinner table on the occasion of the elder Free-Ride offspring dropping a piece of broccoli:
Younger offspring: Pick it up! 1-2-3-4– that was close!
Elder offspring: (having retrieved the piece of broccoli from the floor) You’re counting your seconds too fast. You should say, “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, …”
Younger offspring: But I wanted to be sure you got it before it was too late and you couldn’t eat it any more.
Dr. Free-Ride: I think you guys are taking the five second rule a little too seriously.
Elder offspring: You’re the one who always calls it.
Dr. Free-Ride: Then I’m the one who should lead the critical examination of it.
What is the “five second rule”?
In case you haven’t heard of it (say, because your parents were more mature than the sprogs’ parents), the idea is that if you drop a piece of food and manage to pick it up within five seconds, it’s still good. This rule of thumb suggests that whatever would render the dropped food not-good to eat takes at least six seconds to do its work.
What the five second rule will not protect against:
Microorganisms on the surface onto which the food has dropped. Check out the press release on an excellent study of this question done by Jillian Clarke during the summer of 2003 — while she was a high school student. According to her measurments, E. coli were transferred from ceramic tiles to gummy bears and fudge stripe cookies in less than five seconds.
This explains why the five second rule is seldom invoked in a gas station restroom.
The sprogs and I came up with some other conditions where the five second rule would be pretty useless:
- dropping food onto a patch of wet paint
- dropping food onto dog poo
- dropping a wet lolipop onto sawdust or feathers or glitter or … well, pretty much anything but a dry floor or a pile of sugar.
Anything that is transferred instantly and is not good to ingest presents an exception to the rule.
Why might the five second rule makes some sense in certain cases?
Younger offspring: If the floor is clean but you don’t pick up the dropped food for more then five seconds, there might be time for ants or spiders to get on the food.
Elder offspring: Also, you want to pick up the food before you step on it. Even if the floor is clean, the bottom of your shoes could be dirty.
Younger offspring: If you don’t pick up the food you dropped quickly, you might drop some more food on the food you already dropped, and you might not like those two kinds of food to touch each other.
Elder offspring: If the food is on the floor a really long time, it might start to spoil.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: If you don’t get the food off the floor right after you drop it, you’ll end up with a dirty floor, and who wants to eat food off a dirty floor?
Elder offspring: If the floor is clean or maybe just has crumbs that you can brush off, the food you dropped is probably still good to eat.
Younger offspring: If the dropped food get schmutz on it, sometime you can rinse it off and it will be OK.
Elder offspring: Could you also wash off germs that might have gotten on the dropped food?
Dr. Free-Ride: Probably about as well as we can wash the germs off the food before we prepare it. But there are times when you just don’t want to take a chance and it’s better to throw the food out.
* * * * *
Some advocates of the five second rule may see limited ingestion of icky stuff as an immune system builder. For many of us, the five second rule was less an effort to engineer such immune system building than a pragmatic response to the realization that our toddlers were waiting for us to turn our heads so they could eat fistfulls of sandbox sand. A fishy cracker dropped on the kitchen floor stops seeming like a big deal when you have a sand-eater in your care.
Okay, this is probably the funniest thing I think I’ll read today. Hilarious!
Of course, as a geologist, I guarantee I’ve eaten my fair share of dirt and who knows what else, usually accidentally, sometimes deliberately (a good way to tell a silt or mudstone from a claystone is to scrape it against your teeth, after all).
The five-second rule stops being a very appealing course of action when you start to think about where you shoes have been before you walked across the kitchen floor.
This reminded me of the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1z6OCRJVks
Crazy Americans, always playing fast and loose with the rules. In Australia it’s the three second rule! Same amount of time you need to wait after someone leaves their seat before you can steal it.
Time can be extended for pizza, on a non-carpet floor.
As for taking someone’s seat, the time is decreased dramatically if it’s the seat in front of the pizza. Or next to the attractive woman.
And for young toddlers just learning to eat solid food, it tastes BETTER after marinating on the floor for a while (why else would they refuse to eat the food on their tray, but pick it off the floor two minutes later?)
The recursion here is wonderful.
Which is why there’s a strict shoes-at-the-door rule in my own house, at least.
hmm.. now I feel so unscientific..
for us it’s the 10 second rule, but the rule is invalidated if some of the food is stuck to the floor, which suggests that some of the stuff from the floor could also have stuck to the food.
Our 5-year-old daughter invokes it all the time.
and she has an amazing immune system
Dr.- You and the sprogs might want to check out Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters which fairly recently devoted an episode to proving or disproving the validity of this proposition.
Our five second rule often stretches into ten. I do make an exception for toast that always seems to land butter side down and a few other wet things.
Wonderful post. I’m still laughing.
I always thought the five second rule was meant to prevent abuse of replacements for dropped treats: “Mommy, I dropped [the last bite of] my cookie, can I have another?”
i see nobody here has heard of the birth order rules. What rule you use depends on the birth order of the child. To whit…
First Child: “No dear, mustn’t touch. That’s dirty.”
Second Child: “Here dear, let mommy clean it off first.”
Third Child: “You wanted it, you eat it.”
The religious wackjob wingnuts here in Houston would no doubt tell you that if you get right with God, you don’t have to worry about eating food that lay on the floor for some defined period. And, of course, since microbes can’t evolve, your kids are already immune to the immutable bacteria and viruses that accompanied Adam and Eve’s creation. Or maybe bad bugs were created after the expulsion from Eden; or else the stress of the expulsion permanently damaged the previously-perfect immune systems of A&E.
wow, in our house if you can get the food before the dog does you’re golden. But she’s gotten fussy so you’ve got hours to retrieve the delicacy du floor.
As for the sand eating, man, i’m so glad I don’t have to change those diapers anymore. Just the thought of the sound of sand on toddler teeth makes me shudder. My 8yo labrat ate so much dirt (I was taking a soils class when he was a tot). You cannot imagine his glee when we visited a sand pit: there he was 15mo bulldozer using his mouth as a blade. Bleah.
Great post
Do you have special slippers to wear in and out of your bathroom?