Back when I was a kid, we had some strict dinner table rules. One, you were supposed to eat everything on your plate. Two, you were supposed to use a knife and fork correctly. Failure to do so would lead to your enrollment in “Knife and Fork School,” a fictional summer camp my parents made up that I somehow fell for. It’s hard to teach proper table manners, especially when most of your meals are in front of your family. In your own home, you might also be willing to, say, eat food off the floor, or fail to wash a utensil properly before reusing it. Even if you swear these practices will never leave your front door, sometimes they do. And they’re a little grosser than you might think.
A recently released book called Did You Just Eat That? Two Scientists Explore Double-Dipping, the Five-Second Rule, and other Food Myths in the Lab explores how dangerous some of these food habits are. And the one that’s most surprising is likely something you’ve done at every party: double-dipping.
Common around vegetable trays, a double dip occurs when you dip a snack into a spread, take a bite, and use that same end to enter the spread once again.
Since it really just made brief contact with your mouth, you may think nothing of it. But if this is a practice you don’t necessarily want to drop, you might not like reading what authors Paul Dawson and Brian Sheldon discovered.
“The main thing we found that there is bacterial transfer during double-dipping,” Dawson said in an interview with Munchies. “There’s no way of knowing how many people have gotten sick from it, but I’d be willing to bet there’s at least one. If you’re at a party and someone’s sick, and then, later on, you’re sick, you might wonder what happened.”
Just think about it. If you’ve ever gotten sick after a party, you might blame the party itself. But, it could have been because someone with a cold double-dipped.
Dawson also discussed the five-second rule.
He stated that bacteria travels instantly onto the food once it hits the floor. So, that means that germs probably spread quicker in dip than you realize.
As it’s tough to avoid the dip, you might want to be extra cautious when it comes to sharing plates like this. Make sure to keep an eye out, and try to dip in untouched areas of the dip container. And make sure to do your part as well — even if you’re feeling healthy, it’s not the most gracious act.
