You Can Officially Ignore The 5-Second Rule And Just Eat Off The Floor
Nothing is more depressing then when you make (or buy) a delicious specimen of food and you drop it on the floor because you’re clumsy af.
If you’re alone, you probably eat that shit. But if you’re with other people, you have to throw the food away, a single tear rolling down your cheek, because one of your annoying friends will say some shit about how dirty the floor is. In your head you’re thinking “five second rule” and lurching to grab it as soon as possible, but you stop as soon as you realize that the people around you are looking at you appalled.
Well, fuck them, because it turns out that it’s completely acceptable to eat off of the kitchen floor.
Well, maybe not completely acceptable, but science says the five second rule is bullshit, and eating off the floor is better than eating off the counter.
Basically, five seconds means nothing. If there’s a lot of bacteria on the floor, it’s getting on your food in milliseconds regardless, according to a study. But if we’re talking your kitchen floor, you shouldn’t feel bad about eating stuff off of it… in most cases.
Another study, done in 1998, found that compared to other kitchen surfaces, the floor is relatively clean.
They found that the kitchen floor was likely to harbor, on average, about three colonies per square inch of coliform bacteria (2.75 to be exact). So there are some. But here’s the thing — that’s cleaner than both the refrigerator handle (5.37 colonies per square inch) and the kitchen counter (5.75 colonies per square inch)…
I know a lot of people who are worried about the toilet seat, but it’s cleaner than all the things in the kitchen I just mentioned (0.68 colonies per square inch). What’s dirtier in the bathroom? Almost everything. The flush handle (34.65 colonies per square inch), the sink faucet (15.84 colonies per square inch) and the counter (1.32 colonies per square inch).
Obviously, this information is all relative. If you haven’t cleaned your kitchen floor since you moved into your apartment last fall, this may not hold true. But think about how many times you eat shit directly off of the counter whereas you immediately throw it away if it falls on the floor?
At the end of the day, there is bacteria on fucking everything. You probs shouldn’t be eating the half-eaten pack of Twinkies you found on the street this morning, but you also can’t avoid bacteria unless you want to live in a pod like bubble boy.
So if you drop that pizza on your floor in a drunken daze, go ahead and eat it. YOLO, right?
