Navigate to next or previous posts:

« .BadIdea, Mikko | Emergent Chaos Main page | Disclosure in The UK »

Food and Bacterial Risk Assessment

(Posted by arthur)

mcgee.jpgHow clean is that piece of food that you dropped on the floor? Do you really want to eat it? Harold McGee explores the five-second rule in the New York Times. Personally, I always heard it as the thirty-second rule. I guess that it's a good thing I have a strong immune system.

Posted by arthur on May 9, 2007 at 7:53 AM in Amusements , personal security . You can: comment, view comments (3), see trackbacks (0) or search Technorati.

Bookmark this post:

Comments

What an amazingly bad and depressingly typical example of risk management. McGeee succumbs to classic fear mongering in this article telling the Gentle Reader that they should be afraid of eating things they have dropped when the real risk management lesson should be not to allow surfaces in your home to become major outbeak areas for germs.

Posted by: Blivious | May 9, 2007 8:41 AM

Actually I disagree. At the end of the article, he covers the essence of risk assessment by telling the reader to consider the context of the food being dropped.

If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating.

Admittedly, it would have been nice for him to go into this more, but I still think the basic idea is called out correctly.

Posted by: Arthur | May 9, 2007 8:50 AM

Clearly this man never watched the MythBusters episode where they tested the 5 second rule. As any first-year biology student can tell you, the more gooey the object, the more bacteria, fungus, and molds it is going to collect in 5 seconds.

Posted by: Thinker | May 10, 2007 8:31 PM