First of all, hygiene is needed in the kitchen. The basic rule is to wash your hands every time we are going to handle food, but some are reluctant to follow it. To convince the skeptics, an X user (formerly Twitter) has shared an example that leaves no room for doubt.
“Two slices of bread: one handled with clean hands and the other with dirty hands. Wait a few days and this is the result,” writes the popularizer and doctor in Food Science and Technology, Miguel A. Lurueña, who accompanies the comment with an illustrative photograph.
On the left, a sliced ??bread sandwich in good condition; On the right, same sandwich, but full of mold. “This experiment, which is already a classic, shows it very well. It became famous after the publication of a US school teacher (J.A. Metcalf),” he adds.
As the popularizer explains, in his experiment, some students put their hands dirty and others clean, after washing them with soap and water. They put each of the slices in a bag, closed them and waited a few days.
After that time they observed that, on the burr of the clean hand, no changes were seen, while on the other, the one on the dirty hand, mold grew.
However, Lurueña points out that “the presence of pathogenic microorganisms is not always seen so obviously”, which is why you should not rely on the appearance of the food to decide whether it is in good condition or not. “If a food looks bad, it probably is. But just because it looks good does not mean it is in good condition. For example, a tortilla that has been in the refrigerator for eight days,” she adds.
According to the popularizer, the best way to avoid this contamination is to “respect duration dates, wash hands, refrigerate perishable foods and cook them sufficiently,” in addition to washing our hands again during the handling process.
