Is the ‘5-Second Rule’ your dining guide?

Jeff Kaley

WAURIKA — Although we have different approaches at our house, when it comes to hygienic food handling, some people adhere to the “5-Second Rule”: Should a piece of food fall to the floor, if retrieved within 5 seconds, it’s still germ-free and you won’t die of botulism by eating it.

Around our pad, though, the 5-Second Rule doesn’t apply. In fact, sanitary food handling is one of the, uh, few subjects on which the Karen and I differ.

When it comes to “clean, healthy food” and “yucky, tainted food,” Karen and I have a fundamental difference in interpretation that I think is a result of our raisin’.

See, my lovely other grew up in Wichita, Kan. and Norman, O-k-l-a-h-o-m-a. She’s a city girl.

On the other hand, I was reared in the Illinois equivalent of Marlow. That’s right, thank John Denver, I’m a country boy!

This is a generalization, but it’s been my observation that city and country folks have contrasting attitudes and practices when it comes to food-related hygiene. Metro and rural people have a basic difference in defining what’s “yucky” and what’s “no big deal.”

A city native will come across a stray potato chip that’s been laying around a week and immediately toss it out. A country person (probably a male) will discover said chip, and if it didn’t come from between the couch cushions, it’s a viable snack.

Influenced by her city upbringing, Karen not only disdains the 5-Second Rule, he goes by the “Nanosecond Rule.” To wit: If you’re chopping a carrot and a sliver of it flies off the counter and onto the floor, it’s no longer suitable for consumption.

It doesn’t matter if you catch the carrot chunk on the first bounce, if that veggie piece comes in contact with linoleum or tile, it’s toast. (Hmmm, is that a mixed food analogy?)

When a piece of food does touch the floor, City Girl dons rubber gloves and deposits the now-tainted foodstuff in the trash, usually accompanying that action with a crinkled nose and the two-syllable word, “Eee-yewww!”

On the other side of the food chain, ol’ Country Boy exists by the “If It Ain’t Fuzzy, It’s Fine Rule.”

To wit: If a chunk of carrot falls to the floor, and three days later you notice it while sweeping up, if the carrot carcass is not covered by some type of fuzzy mold, it’s still edible.

Really, all you have to do is brush off the dust bunnies and that carrot hunk is fine.

Country Boy does have some standards, of course. I shy away from retrieving any semi-liquid food — such as cottage cheese or ice cream — that plops on the floor, mainly because scooping it up and slurping it down looks undignified. (Although, if nobody’s looking ...)

Also, I draw the line at eating anything — even chocolate — that’s come in contact with a cat box.

But to pass up a perfectly good piece of food just because it’s made contact with the floor or the ground? Ah, c’mon.

When Country Boy was young, he and his buds spent joyous hours outdoors discovering the world through our taste buds. It was common to chew on twigs and weeds, run your tongue over some tree sap or even take a little bite out of a mud pie. (Rule of thumb was: If it didn’t kill you, it might be good.)

Swimming in ponds and rivers, you couldn’t help ingesting water that probably wouldn’t pass a DEQ test these days, but none of us ended up with brain damage. (OK, we do wonder about a couple of cousins, but other than that, most of us turned out normal.)

Roasting marshmallows over a campfire was great treat. And if your marshmallow happened to melt off the stick, it wasn’t considered gauche to fish it out of the burning embers and eat it, since the ash added a nice “crunch” to the delectable morsel.

City Girl was not exposed to the wonderful, guilt-free openness of this form of dining. Thus, when a hunk of meatloaf slips off my plate and drops onto the dining room carpet, and I nonchalantly reach down, pluck it up and stick it in my pie hole, I try to be understanding as Karen jumps up from the table and sprints to the bathroom.

After all, she’s a city girl — a gastronomic victim of her raisin’.

(OK, before Karen strangles me and I get a terse call from my mother, wondering why I’ve embarrassed the whole family — again — let me ’fess up: Creative license was taken with some of this column and I may have embellished. It’s up to the reader to decide what’s real and what’s just me being a big wind bag, as my sweet wife phrases it!)

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