Food History

A friend sent me to this article. It’s a lucid explanation of the problems underlying a recent piece of scientific research. It’s also fun to read.

I’m not going to repeat what it says (mostly), but I do have some comments of my own.

Whether or not (and how) you use the five-second rule in assessing if you can eat food dropped on the floor is part of your foodways. Foodways aren’t just compilations of cool recipes: they’re also ways of keeping well and safe. They range from how to handle burning pots to how much salt you need in a pickle. The thing is, that foodways are hard to assess scientifically.

What I love about Monica Hesse’s article is that she shows us exactly how the rule really operates and why the scientific experiment was fundamentally flawed. Some of her comments are about safety. Some of are about social behaviour. Some of them are about popular beliefs and why we use them.

One thing that’s very clear, right from the beginning, is that the amount of bacteria picked up by certain food under certain circumstances was only tangentially relevant to the five-second rule. Anaiah Grissom age 9 went straight to the heart of it when she was asked if it really took five seconds for the germs to grow (in other words, if the five second rule had a pseudo-science basis that needed testing): “Nah. It’s just what you say.”

The thing about foodways and folkways and family tales is that there’s often a narrative component.

With the five-second rule the narrative component is invoking the rule itself. You choose to make people think you’re extra hygenic, or averagely hygenic or fantastically gross by when you invoke the five-second rule and for what food. You can make your narrative more complicated by having different rules for different foods and for different floors. You can make your narrative more exciting by going “Ew” at appropriate points.

There are reasons behind narratives. I’m not going to talk about them, though, since I don’t want this post to be an essay. What’s most important is that actual bacteria are players in the five-minute rule narrative, but not the major players: the major players are people.

The scientist who wrote the Clemson article (the one that got this discussion started) is obviously using the dramatic narrative, though I suspect not intentionally. “We are all at risk,” he says in the article.

He genuinely thinks that the five-second rule is something that needs validating scientifically because people believe it? As a scientist, he perhaps should have tested levels of belief before he tested levels of bacteria. Or maybe he should have studied the place of the five-second rule in foodways and narratives.

Note: The picture today is my narrative, which alas, doesn’t contain the five-second rule (but it’s a terrific example of gratuitous advertising).

food history, foodways, five-second rule, Monica Hesse, Washington Post, Clemson University