After some comments in my post about shrimp cocktail, I began to think about kitchen fears. Shayna covered "risky eating" in April, but what about how you run your kitchen and how you prepare your food? Are you an Alton Brown, who treats raw chicken like an infectious disease with his gloves, sterilizing, and paranoia? Are you like a Jamie Oliver, who will run ribs, chicken, and lamb through a barbecue sauce, and then run his finger through it to lick and taste? Maybe somewhere in between?I am, by no means, going to refute the possible dangers of bacteria. Everyone's immune systems are different, and one person's healthy, bacteria-filled oasis is another's stomach-bugged hell. That being said, I'm happy to say (knock on wood) that it's never been an issue for me. In my early cooking days, I would try to keep things clean, but would always get a little lazy with my chicken/meats -- until I dated someone who looked at my kitchen practices with horror. I got more particular and careful, especially when cooking for others, but when I'm only cooking for me, I'm still fairly lax.
And I see no reason to change my habits. I've never had food poisoning, and I have only been sick a few times in the last 10 years. It's hard not to buy into the notion that exposure is great for building resistance when my lifestyle has kept me ridiculously healthy.
How about you?
And we're not talking about your mental health because you haven't looked at anything but spreadsheets for four days. We're talking about your physical health.
One of the most popular and long-lived old wives' tales is known as the "5-second
rule". The "rule" stipulates that food that has fallen on the floor is still safe to eat if you pick it
up within five seconds of it hitting the ground. It has been around for many, many years, propagating itself on school
playgrounds across the country and possibly even the world. Variations exist, shortening the rule to 3 seconds or
expanding it to 10, but the basic theory remains. Unfortunately, it isn't true, as the Sacramento Bee's Lisa Heyamoto
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