Skip Navigation
Casual Conversation @lemm.ee
Call me Lenny/Leni @lemm.ee

When did we become afraid of eating off the floor?

Maybe this is a cultural thing, but the idea of a solid food hitting the floor and it suddenly being off-limits is alien to me. I was taking a pill for pain this morning. I dropped it on the floor and picked it up and swallowed it with water anyways, and a classmate I was with had this reaction like I had just eaten a worm. Does it supposedly cause illness or bad luck, because I've never gotten any in all my years...

22 comments

  • Well, a lot of it comes down to what's on the floor, and how aware you are of risks

    Truth be told, a pill isn't going to pick up anything that's going to hurt you in the amount of time it takes to pick it up, unless you're in a location that is highly contaminated. And if you're in that kind of place, you wouldn't be taking a pill inside to begin with, you'd be geared up.

    But, floors are what we walk on. When we walk, every step picks things up, and the next puts some of it down.

    As such, anything could be there, from something as innocuous as sand to as bad as the eggs of a parasite. If someone isn't following good practices and is walking around in the wrong places they could track in anything, even crazy shit in a hypothetical, like uranium dust or whatever.

    Your average household though, you're maybe going to be dealing with mild chemicals in small amounts, some e-coli, maybe some tetanus, and the usual assortment of bacteria, fungi and particulates that are everywhere anyway. So, if what you drop isn't going to carry enough of any of that into your mouth to disturb the microflora already present, it won't matter.

    Thing is, the wetter something is, the more it's going to pick up, and the more likely it is to carry it to your mouth. A pill isn't picking much up, and some will fall off. A piece of bologna is picking up a lot and it'll stick.

    So, it's all about risk management. There's some really dangerous stuff on even very clean floors sometimes. If you're walking in and out a lot, the risks go up that something bad will be there. Me? I'm at least going to thoroughly wash that bologna if I starving and I can't afford to replace it. Then cook it to hopefully kill anything left behind. But a pill? I'd have done exactly what you did because the risk is so low it isn't worth worrying about.

    • eggs of a parasite

      How would those get on some shoes, then on a floor, and never get seen?

      • Because they're tiny. Some are invisible without magnification. Even the bigger ones are smaller than a grain of rice, and an unusually small grain at that.

        All it takes is walking through dirt that's been exposed to something infected. It doesn't even have to be where an animal poops directly on the spot, some eggs can handle being washed away during rain to somewhere else. Which means that even pavement isn't completely risk free where avoiding bare ground would help.

        You ever watch crime shows where they bring up Locard's principle? The idea is that no matter where you go or what you do, you will transfer something from one place to the next. That something may be indistinguishable from the environment, but we're swimming through clouds of dust and microbes every step we take.

        Every step you take, barefoot or shod, you're in contact with something. Teeny tiny pieces will be picked up. It may fall off the very next step, or a dozen later, but you're carrying things along, even on the slickest, smoothest shoes. There's little microscopic textures that grab things.

        An egg for a parasite is usually going to be great at sticking to things. That's how they find new hosts. Some of them can survive for scary amounts of time in fairly difficult conditions.

        The question isn't whether or not you've ever carried something like that into your house, it's how many and how often.

  • People have vastly varying thresholds for what is acceptable here.

    Also, this is one of those issues where it is far easier to make a case for "hygiene and cleanliness" and far harder to accept the opposite. So it acts kinda like a ratchet mechanism (easy to turn one way, difficult to bring it back the other way).

    • I do both kind of. I do always think of things in terms of "how clean is this" but think of the relativeness of it enough where I think of it as being able to pass. If I was in a lab, that might be one thing, but my setting is on the mundane side.

22 comments