When you drop food on the floor or the sidewalk, how long is it safe to pick up and eat? Turns out dirt has a lot going for it
The flatter and wetter the food, like bread, buttered bread and gummy candy, a 2016 study found, the more likely it was to get contaminated. Representation pic/iStock
It was 12.45 pm at the Reader’s Digest office at Vaju Kotak Mark. I don’t wear a watch, never have, but I was sure about the time. My cue was the appearance of the dabbawala with my hot, home-cooked, mother-made South Indian lunch.
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Until COVID-19 and the Swiggy’s and Zomatos of the world drove them to extinction, the punctuality and efficiency of Mumbai’s dabbawalas were legendary.
Logistics companies like FedEx studied them to learn their secrets. The Harvard Business School wrote about their business model, which has received Six Sigma Certification. This coveted rating is given to any process capable of producing 99.99966 per cent defect-free products, equivalent to 3.4 defects per million opportunities.
It was my rotten luck that one day, my lunch dabba became one of those 3.4 defects per million.
The dabbawala came straight up to my desk. “Sirji,” he said, “today your dabba fell out of the tray, and some of the rice and dal landed on the road.”
A part of me wondered if the man had raided my hot meal.
“But don’t worry, sir,” he said, as though reading my mind. “It’s all back there now. I scooped the food up from the road and put it right back in the dabba.”
“How long was it on the road before you put it back?”
“Not more than 10 seconds,” he said. “You can eat it without fear.”
Could I really? How long is food safe to eat after it falls on a dirty surface?
There is a five-second rule that says food picked up off a contaminated surface within five seconds is safe to eat. But is it true?
The most exhaustive study into this was done at Rutgers University. They grew a salmonella strain and applied it to a carpet, ceramic tile, stainless steel and wood. Carpets, they found, were poorer transmitters of germs than other surfaces.
The flatter and wetter the food, like bread, buttered bread and gummy candy, a 2016 study found, the more likely it was to get contaminated.
Moisture-rich foods such as watermelons are like sponges, easily picking up salmonella, E. coli or staph infections within one second off the floor. Even more dangerous, say experts, might be food dropped on a kitchen counter or cutting board that has been touched by raw meat, which can contain various deadly bacteria.
A slight American woman at a 10-person dinner at my house begged to differ. She picked up pasta and cheese that had fallen on the floor and popped it in her mouth. An OMG moment.
“This is how I build up my immune system,” she explained. “In my country, people are obsessed with hygiene, and they’re paying a big price for it.”
Immune system disorders like multiple sclerosis, Type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, asthma and allergies are all spiking in the US and developed countries. Obsessively protected from germs, their immune systems are out of whack, sitting ducks to every germ that comes along.
But Mumbai’s street-children eat off sidewalks and rubbish dumps daily. The neighbourhood puchkawalla wipes his hands on a damp, smelly, overused dishcloth—and then dips it into the jal jeera for you. You’re getting way more than you paid for.
Crawling toddlers instinctively put things from the floor into their mouths until Mama pries them out.
Researchers into the so-called hygiene hypothesis say that the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with “dirt” spur the development of a healthy immune system. Some studies say that worms may help calm down a hyper-sensitive immune system that triggers autoimmune disorders, allergies
and asthma.
Dr Joel Weinstock, gastroenterologist and hepatologist in Boston, says the immune system at birth “is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction. Children raised in an ultra-clean environment are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.”
Dr David Elliott, gastroenterologist at the University of Iowa, says, “Dirtiness comes with a price. But cleanliness comes with a price, too.” His studies suggest that intestinal worms might be the best ‘influencers’ in calming down a hyper-sensitive immune system.
My American friend Bill, a lifelong sufferer of an incurable, poorly understood, lethal auto-immune disorder called sarcoidosis, would agree. The disease regularly ravages and depletes him, but this time, he looked pink and chipper when I met him on a Bangkok street.
“You found a cure?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “I got myself a hookworm infection in Cambodia.”
Most Cambodian doctors, he told me, don’t have a clue what asthma is because they hardly ever encounter it. Nearly every Cambodian child, playing barefoot in the village dust, picks up hookworm infection. Not many know that among parasitical worms, the hookworm is exceptional in negotiating a peace treaty with the immune system. By dialling down the human immune response, it ensures its own survival.
In Cambodia, Bill found a doctor who specialised in hookworm infestation, who introduced hookworm larvae into Bill’s body through cuts on his forearm. Within 10 days, Bill was as worm-infested as any Cambodian child. Not long after, his immune system calmed down and his sarcoidosis symptoms receded.
“I’ve never felt better,” he told me.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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