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    Did You Just Eat That?: Two Scientists Explore Double-Dipping, the Five-Second Rule, and other Food Myths in the Lab
    Did You Just Eat That?: Two Scientists Explore Double-Dipping, the Five-Second Rule, and other Food Myths in the Lab
    Did You Just Eat That?: Two Scientists Explore Double-Dipping, the Five-Second Rule, and other Food Myths in the Lab
    Audiobook5 hours

    Did You Just Eat That?: Two Scientists Explore Double-Dipping, the Five-Second Rule, and other Food Myths in the Lab

    Written by Paul Dawson and Brian Sheldon

    Narrated by Matthew Boston

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Is the five-second rule legitimate?

    Are electric hand dryers really bacteria blowers?

    Am I spraying germs everywhere when I blow on my birthday cake?

    How gross is backwash?

    When it comes to food safety and germs, there are as many common questions as there are misconceptions. And yet there has never been a book that clearly examines the science behind these important issues-until now. In Did You Just Eat That? food scientists Paul Dawson and Brian Sheldon take listeners into the lab to show, for example, how they determine the amount of bacteria that gets transferred by sharing utensils or how many microbes live on restaurant menus. The authors list their materials and methods (in case you want to replicate the experiments), guide us through their results, and offer in-depth explanations of good hygiene and microbiology. Written with candid humor, this fascinating book will reveal surprising answers to the most frequently debated-and also the weirdest-questions about food and germs, sure to satisfy anyone who has ever wondered: should I really eat that?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJan 30, 2019
    ISBN9781684416530
    Did You Just Eat That?: Two Scientists Explore Double-Dipping, the Five-Second Rule, and other Food Myths in the Lab

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    Reviews for Did You Just Eat That?

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Despite the subtitle, this really isn't a book about testing food myths. It's about a series of small experiments the authors did with their students, mostly aimed at testing how much potential there is to transfer bacteria (and to a lesser extent, viruses) to food by doing all the different kinds of things you might expect to contaminate food, including dropping it on the floor and double-dipping your chips into it.It's kind of an odd little book. All the experiments are presented basically as if they were being written up for scientific publications, complete with all the numbers and statistics and careful little details, but all the material between them takes this sort of very determinedly breezy tone, explains biology basics for the complete layman, and features lots of drawings of little cartoon germs. The cartoons are kind of cute, and I always do appreciate having the methodology of experiments spelled out when they're being explained to me (even though I do admit to skimming those bits after a while, as they got very repetitive), but I have to say that the combination of the two things was a bit weird, as if the authors were very unsure just who their audience was supposed to be (or maybe differed with the publisher about it?). As for their conclusions, well, they pretty much all boil down to: the world is swarming with micro-organisms and they will get onto your food, your hands, and pretty much anywhere else given the slightest chance, and basically anything whatsoever that you imagine might give them the chance will. Halfway through the book, I was fighting the urge to go find a sterile bubble to live and and to figure out a way to never have to touch food again. By the end, I was struggling not to just give up and think, "Well, it's almost impossible to avoid this stuff and I've very seldom gotten really sick from it, so maybe I should just stop struggling and accept the inevitable germiness of my dinner." Which is certainly not the message the authors intend to convey. I do like the analogy they use about eating food that's fallen onto the floor: that it's like using a seat belt in the car. The seat belt doesn't matter if you're not in an accident, and eating the food off the floor doesn't matter if the floor didn't have anything dangerous on it, but since you never actually know whether you're going to get rear-ended, or whether there's e. coli hanging out on your kitchen tiles, maybe you should just do the safer thing, anyway. They also include some food safety tips at the end of the book -- beyond just "maybe don't eat off the floor" -- which I think are pretty standard, and which I was mostly following anyway, but which are probably useful to review.