THE 5 SECOND RULE

dependent upon the surface

but deep down, i would eat it

dependent upon the surface

― John Hyman (misspelled intentionally) (omar little), Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:08 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no lawyering. eat it or beat it!!!

This is like my personal Lady or the Tiger.

Check for hair or specks of dirt, then eat it.

Man, if "depends on the surface" is lawyering, then I don't wanna be non-lawyering

beat it

Also, depends on the food. Some can be washed.

no washing, goes against the rule

voted "eat it," attribute my excellent immune defenses in part to this policy.

shake it off and eat it.

eat it if i'm not at home (too much cat hair)

eat it, dogs eat dirt all the time, and they dont even live as long as us

lol

btw is the 5 second rule some canadian shit? i always knew it as the 10 second rule.

I wouldn't eat anything that landed in feces no matter how long it had been, but then again, I am a lawyer.

btw is the 5 second rule some canadian shit? i always knew it as the 10 second rule.

― John Hyman (misspelled intentionally) (omar little), Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:17 PM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^

faster reflexes up here

i always knew it as the 5 second rule

also its dirtier, more moose hair, and no hospitals if you get sick

hell i thought it was 30. some dirtbags up here

lol xp

canadian germophobia imo

but i guess wisconsin is pretty close to canada

What, 10 seconds? Even 5 seconds is being lenient, I think. What are you doing during the 10 seconds? Drop it, pick it up, quickscan it, eat it.

Gregor: So what brought you here?
Sam: A fellow that doesn't work so well.
Gregor: The man in the wheelchair? How did he get there?
Sam: Seems to me that was in your neck of the woods back in the late unpleasantness.
[Sam deliberately tests Gregor by spilling the coffee and pushes Gregor's cup off the table. Gregor catches it very fast]
Sam: Good reflexes.
Gregor: Oh yeah, they die hard.

eat it

eat it, dogs eat dirt all the time, and they dont even live as long as us

― max, Wednesday, 11 February 2009 20:16 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Do you think maybe that's the reason they don't live as long?

With 10 seconds, I could drop something, go get a glass of water, come back, and THEN pick it up!

ya 10 seconds is a pretty long time to stare gape-mouthed at a twinkie on the sidewalk

Someone got severely chastised on that cooking show "Chopped" last night for dropping something on the extremely clean floor for of the "kitchen" set for a MICROSECOND and I was like U ALL FRONTIN, name me ONE commercial kitchen that doesn't cook things that fall on the floor???

I have trouble letting this artificial five-second threshold outweigh important considerations like dropping a corn chip on the carpet versus dropping a veal cutlet in the litterbox, but I am voting "eat it" anyway

drop veal cutlet in litter box and coat with litter on both sides, then fry in hot oil for 6 minutes

lol, also gross

the ten second rule is like "you're being sentenced to 25 years in prison". the length of the actual rule, in practice, is maybe half at the most.

or spilling the entire contents of your cereal bowl into the carpet

omar otm

drop nutria liver in litter box and coat with litter on both sides, then fry in hot oil for 6 minutes

http://english.people.com.cn/200607/07/images/rc1.jpg

stop trying to make nutria liver happen, Jordan

i'm american, and i've never even heard of any "10 second rule". it's five seconds, eat it or beat it. i say eat it. blow on it first, maybe, in case of hairs or feces. especially if there are ladies present.

Ok, you can blow off hair, but you cannot "blow" off fecal matter, sorry

are you first generation american? second?

see the ten second rule is a time honored tradition from families with deep american roots

if ppl arnd are the judging kind ill pick it up like im about to throw it away and then furtively consume

i'm american, i've only heard 5 second rule. maybe it's east coast/west coast???

eat it, dogs eat dirt all the time, and they dont even live as long as us

― max, Wednesday, 11 February 2009 20:16 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Do you think maybe that's the reason they don't live as long?

― snoball, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:21 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol dont make me laugh, dirt cant kill anyone, unless youre buried in it i guess

if ppl arnd are the judging kind ill pick it up like im about to throw it away and then furtively consume it

― max, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 2:31 PM (4 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha have totally done this before

Haha for a second I thought you were saying my parents' immigrant status prevented me from having the awesome American ability to blow poop off of food

xp especially when its the last chip in the bag or something... dont make me give up the last chip in the bag because you are some kind of oversterilized mincing crybaby

Beat it. Semen is a disinfectant.

it was an xpost : /

(xxpost)

also. . .serious question here: would a piece of food dropped on the floor accumulate **more** dirt in 10 seconds versus 5 seconds?

No apologies for the xp, that was awesome.

butter side down.

Haha for a second I thought you were saying my parents' immigrant status prevented me from having the awesome American ability to blow poop off of food

Finally, we get to the heart of the matter.

basically if u see food on the ground and it looks good to u go ahead and eat it - i mean food more or less comes from the ground anyway - there is no time limit

eat it if i'm not at home (too much cat hair)

― Tracy Michael Jordan Catalano (Jordan), Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:16 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

If your home is like mine, cat hair makes up 60% of your diet...

Beat it. Semen is a disinfectant.

― Otto Tune (libcrypt), Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:33 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol nice try

also. . .serious question here: would a piece of food dropped on the floor accumulate **more** dirt in 10 seconds versus 5 seconds?

― Mr. Que, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:34 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this goes to the heart of the entire "rule"—be it 5, 10, 1 or 100 seconds

who the hell is often dropping food in poo?

basically mr que just put the SYSTEM ITSELF on trial

(xxxxxpost) what about fruit that grows on trees?

would a piece of food dropped on the floor accumulate **more** dirt in 10 seconds versus 5 seconds?

I hate myself for being the one to say this, but they did a whole MythBusters about this.

I can't remember the result -- my guess is something like "there's a tiny difference, but not on a scale that matters at all w/r/t whether you should eat something or not"

who the hell is often dropping food in poo?

― cheese and other good things (a hoy hoy), Wednesday, February 11, 2009 2:38 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, really.

Question is answered here:

i'm american, and i've never even heard of any "10 second rule". it's five seconds, eat it or beat it. i say eat it. blow on it first, maybe, in case of hairs or feces. especially if there are ladies present.

― noticing the cloud come (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:29 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The 5 Second Rule for Medications and Vitamins:

[ ] swallow
[ ] suppository

i am like lots of generations american, and have mostly lived on the westest coast. plus i do not eat poo kthx.

P.S. The more I think about this, I realize I have a mental map of the entire apartment and the areas of floor I would / wouldn't eat off of

i like threads where nabisco slowly realizes how insane he is

nabisco posts that start with "the more i think about this" are always great

Nabisco's mental map is not that unusual, I think you'll find.

nabisco posts that start with "the more i think about this" are always great

― max, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:52 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ya it's easy to imagine them written feces on his wall

id be interested to see the legend for this map

http://z.about.com/d/movies/1/0/K/T/O/number23pic7.jpg

Q: Is carpet more or less likely to throw dirt onto food than plain floor?

It's a pretty sane mental map, and I assume everyone shares it. You know: where the dog eats, where the cat sleeps, where I always crack eggs and spill a little on the floor, where the trash goes before it gets taken out, etc.

^^ those are the places that add flavor, so you go for it

where the bodies are kept

yah its true i have a mental map of nabiscos apartment too

Also, is shag carpet worse or better than normal carpet? (xp)

theoretically carpets are more likely to have foul shit for a variety of reasons but foul shit is less likely to remain clinging to a slick floor than a carpet, it's more likely to be transferred to your food. good question.

areas of the map marked in brown are...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_z3q4iEadtQU/RgFnw5Jd9SI/AAAAAAAAANE/Xj99251Ipk4/s400/newyorkistan.jpg

And coincidentally, a lot of shag pile carpets I've seen are brown.

location of splashdown is crucial, but so is stickyness of food. like i would eat a dropped cheeto off almost any indoor surface, because cheetos are anaerobic, but a dropped chunk of gravy beef seems like it would grab way more dirt, especially the invisible kind that is full of cancer, etc

ew "splashdown"

any food that can have what is called a "splashdown" goes under 'beat it'

i want an ms paint map of these so called areas

eat it, 90% of the time

yeah, for the record, i voted "eat it" but i'm not trying to sop up, like, soup i've spilled with bread.

any food that can have what is called a "splashdown" goes under 'beat it'

^ probly. no seconds rule applies to soup

we should do this again in a year when we all live in the alley

with internet

Thoughts:

1. Pretty much everything on the ground is cleaner (in microbial terms) than a human mouth. Assuming more or less first-world sanitary conditions, we're mostly dealing with irrational subjective yuck factor here rather than genuine health concerns.

2. Construct your life such that you're not handling food while standing above expanses of poo, and you will never have to formulate a position on whether you would eat something that had been dropped in poo.

3. While it is just ever-so-slightly possible that more undesirable stuff can get on the longer something rests on the ground, most of the "damage" is done immediately. So really, you could have a five-hour rule with the same consequences. An exception is where there may be insecta or other vermin lounging about, which could hop onto the food in the intervening moments between 5 and 10 seconds. But again, see #2.

4. Throwing away perfectly good food because it has touched a clean floor for a few seconds makes the baby Jesus cry. Or, at least, makes Al Gore cry.

2. Construct your life such that you're not handling food while standing above expanses of poo, and you will never have to formulate a position on whether you would eat something that had been dropped in poo.

maybe you get off your high horse, yeah?

A more thorough study in 2006 using salmonella on wood, tiles, and nylon carpet found that the bacteria were still thriving after twenty-eight days of exposure under dry conditions. Tested after eight hours' exposure, the bacteria could still contaminate bread and bologna in under five seconds, but a minute-long contact increased contamination about tenfold (with tile and carpet surfaces only).

The five-second rule was also featured in an episode of the Discovery Channel series MythBusters. There was no significant difference in the number of bacteria collected from 2 seconds exposure as there was from 6 seconds exposure. The moisture, surface geometry and the location the food item was dropped on did however affect the number of bacteria.

Anaerobic cheetos, splashdown, expanses of poo...

Also I am far from a germophobe but c'mon now, fecal matter is not like some irreducible substance that only exists in full-on turd form (especially if you have pets)

I live in squalor! (A picture thread!) :-D

or use it to write on your walls xp

s1ocki I have only advances as far as painting hunt scenes on the walls, no writing yet

Actually, I believe that studies show areas touched daily by many human hands (handrails, bannisters, door knobs, subways poles and straps, etc...) have a sickening amount of bodily fluids and ejecta on them. Depending on the food and the surface, the five second rule works for me, but I also, wrt this subject, prefer to live in denial.

[long nabisco fact-finding quote]

^ first part = "find it, eat it" rule vs. "few seconds" rule. in which case i'll totally go with the latter

second part = warning! do not eat off moist, irregular geometries. especially when they are a catbox

expanses of poo?

question:

for those who beat it.

do you wash your hands before every meal, eating chips etc?

I do wash my hands after every trip to the bathroom, no matter how um minor or unnecessary it may seem, and frequently before touching any cooking or food thing. But I've been living in a house of filth for a while now. I may change my mind once life is civilized.

Also it's really basically delusional because I'm sure the doorknob and the hot and cold taps and etc etc are already covered with everyone else's fecal bacteria so why bother?

To be honest I think the germ thing is a red herring -- I take it for granted that I am constantly putting bacteria in my mouth, and I'd bet that I could lick most of the flooring in my place without even feeling queasy afterward. It's more about how grossed out you're going to be by eating something, and the five-second rule is just an arbitrary artificial threshold created to get you out of feeling bad about eating stuff you plan on eating either way. (It's not like anyone ever says "OMG no way do I want to eat that, but it was only 3 seconds, so I guess I have to.")

The real worry is more that you will taste something you did not want to taste, and that is my #1 reason for not eating things that have fallen on certain types of floor

doorknob and the hot and cold taps and etc etc are already covered with everyone else's fecal bacteria so why bother?

― Laurel

this horrifies me abt public restrooms. that the things you might use to remove or escape the fecal are probably among those most rich with it. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh

I think I've read that most of the bacteria is killed while drying the hands, so those people who walk out of the bathroom still paper-toweling off win on that front

^ that's my strategy

Pretty much everything on the ground is cleaner (in microbial terms) than a human mouth.

I'm not being picky, but I hate those TV adverts for disinfectant that say things like "your kitchen worktop has 6000 times more germs that your toilet seat!!!", because they never say what kind of bacteria, or that the bacteria on the chopping board are different to the bacteria on the toilet seat.

also who the eff uses their toilet seat as a cutting board

Not long ago I was in a restaurant with friends, sitting near the entrance.

One friend (coincidentally, a biologist) was telling us that someone had done a study on how much filth is where in a public setting, and found that after-dinner-mint bowls were especially rife. Presumably because people visit the bathroom at the end of a meal, fail to wash hands, and grab a mint on their way out.

Just as this conversation was ending, we heard someone who was walking out the door say, "Mmmm! Great mints!" You prolly had to be there but it was funny at the time. Seems to me you can react to the news that yuckiness is basically everywhere with extreme cuation, or with cavalier and cheerful resignation. Which I guess puts things back to the beginning of the thread.

um, caution

To be honest I think the germ thing is a red herring

The bad germs vs. not-so-bad germs issue holds some water here, as well as the quantity-of-bad-germs issue. If you ate a fresh dog turd, you'd probably get sick, I figure (Divine notwithstanding?) Even if the germs in the turd are in yr own intestines, the body isn't equipped to deal with them in the upper part of the digestive system. When you walk home (at least in SF), the sidewalk you step on has bits of dog poop that you track into yr abode, for instance, even if you cannot see them with yr naked peepers. It's a judgement call as to whether there's enough dog turd that makes its way inside so's to sicken you when you scoop up for lovely munchings a delectable piece of bologna that's fallen on the foyer floor. I figure that most times, food really isn't that intrinsically valuable to me to place a wager in this horse-shit race. I can always go buy another presumably fresh delicious cheesy corn dog wrapped in bacon at the corner store, I mean.

Come the Bird Flu, and all you beat-its will be gone and the eat-its will be hearty!!!

x-post: yeah, but take that one step farther, and you realize that all the surfaces in yr house are covered with bacteria, both good and bad, no matter how clean, and that includes yr dishes and super especially includes the counters and cutting surfaces (scrub scrub). god, not to mention the food itelf, especially if you don't boil it to death. and the air is full of dirt & bacteria & tiny poop particles, and your hands are covered with junk even after washing, in some ways esp shortly after washing. and what about your clothes? maybe you took off yr shoes, but what about that pants and shirt you sat on the subway in and wore through public restrooms, like the way your fingers maybe brush against your pantleg every now and then, even maybe while yr eating. and every time you inhale you're aspirating a quantity of skin and feces and organisms and god knows what.

in the face of all that, the difference between "okay" and "not okay" surfaces becomes an increasingly trivial point, esp in tight & shiny, lysol-bommed western homes.

Is this thread about whether we prefer the original song or the Weird Al Parody?

No it's about the "adult" videogame for the Atari 2600...

However this thread does make me wonder where coprophiliacs stand on this issue...

I just want to interject that when I was growing up, we learned that the x second rule (sometimes it was 5, sometimes 10, sometimes 30) was applicable because when a piece of food is dropped, all of the relevant bacteria run away (from the force of the impact), and it takes them x seconds to come back to do what they do to your innocent piece of food.

So, eat it.

I feel in the long run the survival of the human race is dependent on enough people opting for 'eat it'.

i remember when i was a child i'd always opt for "eat it", but that died out with a swiftness once i started living in student dwellings - i just can't imagine myself eating it now, unless it was a v recently-cleaned floor and the food was something non-sticky like a crisp or something

Apparently your computer keyboard is dirtier than most things you use on a daily basis and most people don't think twice about typing emails while eating lunch. This is total received wisdom btw but it doesn't remotely surprise me.

it doesn't surprise me either, my work computer keyboard was grosssss. this is why one cleans one's keyboard regularly though.

Aah, I don't mind my computer keyboard, it's like every little bit of gunk on it has a story. There is the smear of tzadziki I spilled on it the first time I heard The Band That Cannot Be Named. There is the tea-spot on the screen that I spat out the first time I read Justice slash. There is the vodka that Momus spilled down it at a particularly drunken Xmas party - wait, wrong laptop.

think of the great story you'll have when you contract methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus from your computer

http://www.vgmuseum.com/scans/scans2/beatem.jpg

ashamed to admit this was the first thing this thread reminded me of

beat it.

(xpost) you can be less ashamed as I thought of it ~16.5 hours before you...

No it's about the "adult" videogame for the Atari 2600...

― snoball, Wednesday, 11 February 2009 23:17 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

helping out 4 u mackro^2

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9066/imageuploadimagehv9.jpg

should i bring this v important question up in my microbiology class?

FUN FACT: did you know that there are more bacteria in yr body than there are actual human cells?

fuck. me

btw i actually don't need to ask: the five second rule doesn't exist, ppl

It exists, it's just not a very sound rule

yeah, that

5...45...who's counting

the bacteria sure aren't

Stop telling bacteria what they think

Mebbe they have little watches. Or they see food drop and count one mississippi two mississippi three mississippi...

they do not have watches or eyes or brains, you guys, all they have is superantigen and lipid A

also they like to fart and they are crazy

also true

"prof schli3v3rt is it true that bacteria like to fart and are crazy?"

bacteria make you fart crazy

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

:D

You know, when you just look at the options and not the thread title, this looks like an entirely different question

heheh

you mean "Jacko or Yankovic?"