I confess that I love double dipping. I love lathering each but of my sauce-less piece of food with so much sauce that by the end of each and every bite, my food is coated with sauce – no room to see the original content. We all know that table manner etiquette dictates that in a public setting, one should refrain from double-dipping but is there a better reason to do so besides wanting to impress someone?
There is bacteria in your mouth and let’s say that after your bite, the bacteria gets transferred to the food. A test done in Clemson University shows that there were 1,000 more bacteria per millilitre of water when crackers were bitten before dipping than solutions where unbitten crackers were dipped. But more importantly, what about sauces. Experimenting with salsa, chocolate and cheese dips the results showed that before dipping, there was no detectable bacteria but once someone double dipped, the salsa took on about five times more bacteria from the bitten chip when compared to chocolate and cheese dips. But two hours after double dipping, the salsa bacterial numbers dropped to about the same levels as the chocolate and cheese. The thickness and acidity of the causes this phenomenon.
So should you not double-dip? Not in a public setting. Many diseases are known to be spread through saliva, with coughing and sneezing aerosolising up to 1,000 and 3,600 bacterial cells per minute. If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people to cover their mouth and nose when coughing and sneezing to prevent spreading disease, it’s safe to say that double dipping is advised against?
I know I need to break the habit of double-dipping my food especially at big parties – do you?
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