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The worst has happened, you’re making breakfast
when you drop your toast on the floor.
You quickly snatch it up before long, and inspect it for dirt.
You don’t see anything, so you think to
yourself, “Eh, 5 Second Rule” before buttering
one side and chowing down before school.
Some surfaces scream “I’M DIRTY”, like the
bathroom floor, but some don’t immediately unveil
themselves as carriers of filth and disease.
Are certain surfaces less likely to transfer dirt, grime,
and bacteria to your food, like ceramic, or wood flooring?
Is the 5-Second rule a myth, or is
it a truth universally acknowledged?
When your beautiful slice of buttered toast lands
square on the floor of your kitchen, do germs latch on
immediately, or is there a window in time that even the
most malevolent microorganisms wouldn’t be able to grab on?
Wait, bacteria know about the 5 second rule… Right?
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And with that out of the way, let’s get into it!
The origin of the 5 second rule is somewhat unclear.
According to writers Paul Dawson and Brian Sheldon in
their book “Did You Just Eat That?”, the concept can be
traced back to the court of Genghis Khan, the medieval
ruler of Mongolia who conquered pretty much everything
between Korea and Poland, oh and also maybe brought the
Black Plague to Europe in the early 13th century?
That guy.
The myth goes that the Great Khan implemented a system
called “the Khan Rule”, any food that had fallen on the
ground would be good to eat as long as the Khan allowed it.
The Khan was so great, that any food that was
up to his standards would still be good even
if it sat on the dirty floor for 12 hours.
Delicious, 12 hour aged floor beef.
Fun fact, historians generally pin the death count of
Genghis’s conquests between 37 to 60 million people,
so maybe dictating what food people were allowed
to eat wasn’t his most grievous character flaw.
TV chef Julia Child has been accredited with popularizing
the attitude, if not the 5 second rule itself.
In an episode of her show The French Chef from
1963, she attempts to flip a potato pancake in a
pan, but misses and drops some of it on the stove.
She grabs it quickly and throws it back into the
pan saying, “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the
courage to do it the way I should’ve, but you can
always pick it up if you’re alone in the kitchen.
Who is going to see?”
Yeah Julia, who is gonna see?
But the first written iteration of a rule comes to
us via Olympic gold medalist Brad Alan Lewis’ 1995
novel “Wanted: Rowing Coach”, stating that “Any food
item that hit the floor was still considered edible if
it was retrieved before twenty seconds had expired”.
The next shows up in 2001, in the animated film Osmosis Jones.
Bill Murray fights a monkey for an egg, dropping
it on the bottom of the zoo cage before eating
it, sending his body into a terrible death spiral
from the villainous “Red Death” pathogen which the
titular white blood cell “Osmosis Jones” must defeat.
By the time the 5 second rule was showing up
regularly in media, the idea that germs were
attaching themselves to our food was likely
already in the minds of the average person at home.
But how did we get here?
How did we first figure out that it was tiny creatures
making us sick, and not like ghosts or something?
The idea that unseen animals and particles in our environment
could trigger illnesses is older than one might expect.
As far back as 36 BCE, Roman philosopher Marcus
Terentius Varro, wrote that “there are bred certain
minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes,
which float in the air and enter the body through
the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.”
The problem is, even if you nail it on the first
try, it doesn’t matter if no one believes you.
Just like my Pokémon Nuzlocke run.
It wasn’t until we had access to powerful magnification
that anyone could prove this theory one way or another.
Two men are generally credited with
the discovery of microorganisms.
The first, Robert Hooke, coined the term “cell” to describe
the microscopic holes he saw in a slice of cork circa 1665.
He saw the wells of individual cork cells laid out,
and thought they looked like cells in a monastery.
Unfortunately, to be able to see bacteria and animal
cells, even stronger magnification was necessary.
The second, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek,
managed to pull exactly that in the 1670’s.
He developed his own sets of microscopes to see even
the smallest cells, and by all accounts the microscope
he made for this discovery was… awkward at best.
The lens was as large as a grain of rice, so Leeuwenhoek had
to jam his eye right up against it to actually see anything.
He saw sperm cells, blood cells, protozoa, bacteria,
and algae cells too, dubbing them “little animals”.
Because of these two men, germ theory found its
beginning, though it would take another 200 years
to connect these “little animals” to disease, and
with that knowledge, the 5-second rule followed.
How else should we make ourselves feel better about
eating an apple slice that fell on the ground,
after we’ve just learned that it could be covered
in gross little monsters that can make us sick?
Well, easy.
We come up with a cute lie.
But is the 5-second rule just that?
Well, lucky for us, food safety specialists,
Robyn Miranda, PhD, and Donald W.
Schaffner, PhD, were determined to find the answer.
In a 2016 study, Miranda and Schaffner contaminated
four different surfaces to see which foods, and which
surfaces are particularly at risk for bacterial adherence.
They picked the bacteria Enterobacter aerogenes because
it’s nonpathogenic, which means it doesn’t make you
sick, but sticks to surfaces similarly to Salmonella.
The four surfaces for their experiment were
stainless steel, ceramic glazed tile, maple
laminate wood, and indoor-outdoor carpet.
The foods were: watermelon, white unbuttered
bread, white buttered bread, and gummy bears.
The researchers disinfected
everything—if possible—before trials.
Miranda and Schaffner then made up a total of 128
contact scenarios, replicating each of them 20
times, totaling 2,560 total contact measurements.
Y’know, everyone loves science until they’re pressing
a watermelon slice on carpet for the 160th time.
So what were their findings?
Well, as it turns out, bacteria on a surface
transfers onto your food pretty much instantly.
Like any food dropped on the ground, the
5 second rule is destined for the trash.
Or is it?
When it comes to materials and
foods, some are worse than others.
Take a wild guess which was the worst, I’ll wait.
If you guessed watermelon, you’d be exactly right!
It seems almost obvious that the wetter the
food, the more it can pick up from the floor.
Now, take a wild guess which one had
the least bacterial transference?
If you guessed the gummy bear, then you’re 2 for 2!
Generally, the study found that the moisture of the food is
the biggest factor in how quickly bacteria can hitch a ride.
Foods with a higher moisture level
collected more bacteria, and vice versa.
They also found that longer contact
times resulted in more bacteria.
Now, of the four surfaces, which one do you
think transferred the least bacteria to the food?
It’s carpet.
CARPET!
Fuzzy, hairy, carpet transferred the LEAST amount of bacteria!
How wild is that?
Anybody?
Oh, okay.
Instead of lying flat against the entire surface,
the “fluff” makes it so very little of the food is
actually in contact with the whole thing at once.
In comparison to tile and stainless steel, carpet had
a very low transfer rate, but wood was less consistent.
Schaffner and Miranda note at the end of their research that
“this research shows that the five-second rule is “real” in
the sense that longer contact time resulted in more transfer,
it also shows that other factors, including the nature of the
food and the surface, are of equal or greater importance.”
The reality of the situation is best
summed up by the venerable Michael Stevens,
best known by his stage name, Vsauce.
He notes that the concept of “touch” at a
molecular level is a lot more complicated
than it might seem to our “macro” perspective.
He says “The 5 Second Rule may be true,
if we rename it the ‘1 Femtosecond Rule’.
Spend less time on the floor than that, and it’s
unlikely that room temperature molecules would have
time to be influenced by intermolecular forces”
That’s a bunch of big words to say if you can pick up
your food in less than a quadrillionth of a second,
you can rest easy knowing that the only bacteria
on your food was already there to begin with.
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