Nicholas Aicher, one of our senior quality control analysts, just completed a landmark study. His studies go so far as to challenge the common wisdom of the “five-second rule.” This later rule would have you believe food dropped on the floor is safe to eat if retrieved in under five seconds. Aicher’s experiment aimed to ascertain how bacterial growth on food varies with the length of time it spends on the ground.
To begin answering these questions, Aicher just put a petri dish on the floor. CSV file, and saw representations of their review data in colorful, engaging visualizations,” wrote Erin. To do this, Aicher took an unconventional approach and filled petri dishes with different foods. This arrangement allowed him to arrest the bacterial growth post exposure for a myriad of time thresholds. The results ignited discussion around food safety and whether or not the five-second rule is real.
Aicher’s results included a very unexpected finding. Food that dropped on the floor for only five seconds had the same bacterial growth as food left for one minute. This largely rendered irrelevant the argument that a short time frame provided some safety benefit. The contaminated sample left for one minute exhibited similar bacterial growth to the five-second sample. Conversely, the dish that was abandoned for ten seconds had generally more bacteria than that. In comparison, plates incubated for 20 and 30 seconds showed a marked uptick in bacterial proliferation.
To her surprise, even the petri dish exposed for zero seconds was contaminated, with white bacterial spots all over. Upon presenting this finding, Aicher remarked,
“Looks like even 0 seconds is too long.”
Even with these findings, most people said they weren’t ready to give up on the five-second rule. Aicher’s experiment has been a hit on his TikTok channel—where he now has close to 450,000 followers. Others pushed back and challenged the accuracy of his results. They went on to recommend that an unexposed control sample, exposed only to air, would have had significant value in this experiment.
The public’s response to their bold move has been just as varied. Many viewers were quick to see the funny side of the findings, with one saying –
“I’ll pretend I didn’t see this so I can keep blissfully doing the 5-second rule.”
Another viewer noted,
“The real factor is just how badly you don’t want to waste what was dropped.”
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