Double Dipping -- Yuck

It was not quite a year ago that Harold McGee, a food/food science writer for the New York Times, summarized some Clemson University research on the 5 second rule for food. Of course that article caught my eye. It's no secret I'm a germ-o-phobe that would find that work fascinating.

But I missed another article that he wrote a couple weeks ago about more research done by the same Clemson researcher. A friend of mine at work pointed out Harold's recent article. In this recent work, the Clemson folks studied the act of double dipping a chip in dip -- incorporated into our pop culture by George Costanza in this Seinfeld episode. As you can imagine, just like the five second rule, it's not a good idea to double dip. I laughed at Harold's quote of Professor Dawson that gives a high level summary of the results: “The way I would put it is, before you have some dip at a party, look around and ask yourself, would I be willing to kiss everyone here? Because you don’t know who might be double dipping, and those who do are sharing their saliva with you.”