Here’s an article that likely shares its source with the radio report you heard. The takeaway is that cleaning a sponge by microwaving or dishwashing it is worse than ineffectual, it’s actually “similar to how people can encourage antibiotic resistant bacteria if they don’t follow the doctor’s orders” by taking their full course of medication. Except that that particular theory doesn’t hold water, according to this.
So! I don’t know what the hell to believe. Still not planning on replacing my kitchen sponge every week, though.
The “new study” you linked to is from 2007. It’s possible that this newer study (it was published last month) relies on more up-to-date research, to whit: “microwave and boiling treatments were shown to significantly reduce the bacterial load. However, results were contradictory, for example showing effectiveness in the laboratory, but not in used kitchen sponges, and no method alone seemed to be able to achieve a general bacterial reduction of more than about 60%.”
And here’s where I repeat that I don’t care, and I’m still keeping my sponges until they either dissolve or become sentient. And if it’s the latter, they can clean their* damn selves.
Long article and lots to wade through. I only saw the mention of heating in the microwave but didn’t see specifics of methodology, how long where they held at what temperature
Funny stuff, in the last fifteen minutes of the hour: This week’s episode of the comic public radio quiz, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, touched on this. They also reported that blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is like rolling it on the floor before slicing it. I never thought about this and now it gives me the squicks, even though I am not remotely a clean freak. People eat the cake immediately after it’s been blown on. We’d recoil if someone sneezed directly onto our dessert…but don’t think about it at birthday parties. Let’s just hope the flame zaps those pathogens!
In Korea at most meals there’s some kind of communal soup in the middle of the table that gets shared. That means everyone is taking their saliva covered spoon and dunking it into the same liquid and redipping over and over through the meal. Absolutely horrifying by American standards but somehow those people seem to be alive and functioning.
Back when my grandmother was washing dishes, I doubt most kitchens even had sponges. My mother learned from her. I learned from my mother. (My mother did have one of those weird “dish mops” made from a really cheap spongy material in a bursty patern at the end of a plastic handle. It was pretty useless.) I find the cloth much better than the other stuff. (I do also use a scrubbing pad if needed.)
Nothing wrong in my mind with eating one course and then another in the same bowl. Sometimes I’ll scramble eggs in a bowl, cook them and then eat them from the same (unwashed, unrinsed) bowl. That’s only when I’m alone of course and I wouldn’t want to be served that way in a restaurant.
Blowing air out of your mouth is not the same as sneezing mucus out of your nose. If minute water droplets from your mouth are that big a problem then you shouldn’t let anyone talk at the table either (samples in forensic labs can become contaminated from the DNA of the the lab techs talking while working, for example, if they don’t wear face masks) . Even worse I suppose would be laughing, which also propels moist air from your mouth across the table.
