Food & Recipes, Kitchen Hacks
Kitchen Safety Tip – avoid food borne bacteria and clean that sponge!
Kitchen sponges can be as dirty as your toilet! So clean or replace them regularly.
I like smart people, but intelligent kids make me smile. Even when the smile is a tad uncomfortable.
My friend and I were sitting in her living room chatting over coffee and cheesecake when her teenage daughter, Isabella, literally bounced into the room with good news: she got an A+ on her biology project.
“What was your project about?” I asked.
“Bacteria in the home,” Isabella answered.
Mom didn’t look too happy.
Without skipping a beat, Isabella explained how she and her lab partner set out Petri dishes all around her home and the homes of four other families (with permission, I assume). After exposing the dishes to the open air for a few hours, the young researchers sealed them and waited to see what kinds of bacteria grew.
“We found 22 forms of mold and bacteria,” Isabella reported flatly. “And you know which room had the most?”
Mom squirmed.
“It was the kitchen!”
Hand to heart, I resisted glancing down at my slice of homemade cheesecake, expertly drizzled with chocolate syrup and dotted with a slice of strawberry. I kept my attention on Isabella, who went on to explain not only did they find more variety of bacteria and molds in the kitchen, there were three times as much of it than in any other room.
Before mom could intervene, Isabella said it: “Even more than the bathroom.”
Breakpoint reached, mom smoothly reminded Isabella about a task that would take her far into the house for an extended period. I suppressed a big grin (for me, that’s hard, I can tell you).
“She’s such a brilliant girl,” I said, taking a big bite of that lovely slice of cheesecake, adding, “Oh, this is so delicious!”
From the scientific perspective, researchers agree with Isabella’s findings. The kitchen is “dirty” like this because it has the most human traffic. It’s not that the kitchen itself is so dirty, it’s that WE’RE dirty. The human body is a veritable magnet for bacteria, molds, and other stuff. And the kitchen is a place where it collects, grows, and prospers.
Luckily Isabella didn’t use the kitchen sponge as part of her study. Mom would have been catatonic.
A couple of years ago, a group of microbiologists released a study about the health dangers of the ordinary kitchen sponge. According to the study, the researchers found more than 300 different kinds of bacteria with literally trillions of those little bugs in ONE sponge. The only other place in your whole house where you’ll find such a concentration of bacteria is – you guessed it, the toilet.
EWWW! I’m not sure it gets any grosser than that. And imagine what you’re doing when you use the kitchen sponge to wipe up a spill on your dining room table!
I have tips for kitchen safety. A few of them are my own that I’ve collected over time. Some you’ll find on the internet that seem to work very well.
First – get cellulose sponges. Williams-Sonoma sells some nice ones that are a handy size that I use in my kitchen all the time. You can also find cellulose sponges on Amazon as well. Cellulose sponges are organic so you can toss them into your compost. They’ll hold up better to when you need to clean them than the artificial ones (e.g., Scotch Bright urethane foam).
Second – this one is passed down from the ages: never use your regular kitchen sponge to clean up after handling raw meat – especially chicken. If a kitchen sponge comes in contact with raw meat, toss it out. Don’t even try to clean it.
Third – speaking of cleaning – bleach doesn’t work on the harmful bacteria. It will wipe out the bacteria that causes the smell, but not the stuff that can make you and your family really sick. For effective cleaning, you must keep up with cleaning sponges every day with any one of these recommended methods:
- Microwave your sponge for 1-3 minutes. There’s some disagreement among the researchers about the time length, but they do agree that microwaving for 1 minute will kill most harmful bacteria. In two minutes, you’ll kill the rest. Three minutes and you’ll end up with a very hot and very clean sponge. Important note: make sure your sponge is wet (not dry) when you put it in the microwave and also note that artificial sponges won’t last as long as cellulose (they tend to flatten out after each cleaning). And, don’t put sponges that have metal (hint: sponges with abrasive pads) in the microwave oven.
- Put your sponge in the dishwasher when you run the heated dry cycle or boil it for about five minutes (but I’m not sure I want that sponge boiling in my good stockpot!). Heat is critical for cleaning sponges and wiping out colonies of harmful food bacteria
- Regularly replace your sponge – at least every month. But some researchers say (and I also agree) that active kitchens should replace all sponges every two weeks at a minimum.
I love those really smart girls who can dig up important facts. But it doesn’t take rocket science to know how important it is to keep your kitchen as clean as possible. Stay safe!
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