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What’s The Dirtiest Thing In Your Kitchen?

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It’s Right Next To Your Sink:  Your Sponge

Whether you cook in your kitchen or just use it to stage your take-out food, almost all of us have a sponge hanging around the kitchen sink.

Whether you use that sponge to wash dishes, pots and pans, or just to wipe up the spills and crumbs on the counter, you might be horrified to find out what’s lurking in your yellow, green, blue, or pink cleaner upper.  Your sponge just might be the dirtiest thing in your kitchen.  Even restaurants, according to the FDA’s Food Code, are prohibited from using a sponge for the final wipe of a surface that comes into contact with food.

 What Can Be Lurking In Your Sponge

CSPI’s Nutrition Action Health Letter (11/11) reports that in a recent NSF International survey of US homes:

  • Coliform bacteria was found in 77% of sponges and dishcloths
  • Yeast and mold was in 86%
  • Staph bacteria was found in 18%

Why Are Sponges So Filthy?

There are a bunch of reasons your trusty cleaner upper is not so trustworthy.

Sponges:

  • are usually wet and/or left in damp areas near your sink – and germs love damp and wet places to multiply
  • constantly touch food residue that then hangs around inside the sponge and provides nutrients for organisms to grow
  • have lots of nooks and crannies that are great places for organisms to set up residence
  • aren’t usually cleaned or sanitized before they are used

What To Do – And What Not To Do

Only washing your sponge in running water and squeezing out the excess doesn’t do a whole lot. Soaking your sponge in 10% bleach (about twice the concentration of household bleach) for three minutes or soaking it in lemon juice or water for one minute turned out to be almost like doing nothing.

If you’re thinking that you’re ready to swear off kitchen sponges forever, there’s hope. Microbiologists at the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Lab found:

  • You can get rid of a significant number of bacteria by microwaving a wet sponge for one minute – make sure your sponge doesn’t have metal in it and that it’s wet (or it might catch fire)
  • Almost as many bacteria are killed by running your sponge through the dishwasher

Of course, if you want to, you could always use good old dishcloths and toss them in the washing machine every day.  Or, you could use paper towels for a lot of wipe up – except that’s not such an environmentally great solution.

So, even if your sponge doesn’t stink or still looks nice and clean, there still might be some nasty stuff living in there.  Just make sure that your sponge and your microwave and/or dishwasher develop a nice friendly relationship.

Does Frozen Mean Less Nutrition?

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So many of us are pressed for time – or just not interested in spending whatever time there is slaving away in the kitchen.  Do you wonder if you sacrifice nutrition by choosing far more convenient frozen produce?

According to the FDA, frozen fruit and vegetables give you the same essential nutrients and health benefits as fresh produce does.

Frozen fruit and vegetables, processed at their peak freshness and nutrition, are really just fresh fruit and vegetables that have been blanched (cooked briefly in boiling water or steamed) and frozen within hours of being picked.

Taste Or Flavor — Which Is It?

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Did you ever hold your nose when your Mom tried gave you foul tasting medicine?  Does triple hot chili bring tears to your eyes and sweat to your forehead  — then lose some of its burn after three or four bites? Both have to do with taste and flavor.

What Is Taste?  What Is Flavor?

Taste is information you get from your taste buds about what you eat.  Flavor is a complex composition in which your brain helps put together tastes, smells, temperature, and the tactile sensation known as “mouth feel” to create what you perceive as flavor. There are five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (savory). Umami, a taste that’s hard to define, is sometimes called meaty, sometimes savory.

Thousands And Thousands Of Taste Buds

Your whole tongue, upper palate of your mouth, and the inside of your cheeks have taste buds that help determine flavor. Groups of 50-250 taste buds are inside the little “bumps” on your tongue. Humans are born with about 10,000 of these tiny taste bud sense organs and they work so hard that your body replaces them about every two weeks. Some taste buds are more sensitive to one taste but they all can detect basic tastes. As you age some taste buds don’t get replaced so older adults may only have 5,000 – which explains why older people may add more salt or sugar to what they’re eating.

What About Smells?

We only recognize five tastes but we can recognize thousands of smells. As much as 85% of the perception of taste comes from smell. For instance, even though a chocolate chip cookie and pecan pie both register as sweet, their flavors are different because their smells, temperatures, and mouth feel are processed along with the taste letting you know that you’re eating a freshly baked, gooey chocolate chip cookie — not pecan pie.

How Does The Taste Process work?

Smell prepares you for tasting and digesting food and it doesn’t matter whether it’s stinky cheese smell or baking brownies smell. For you to taste, food needs to be dissolved.  Smell triggers increased saliva production in your mouth and a small increase in digestive acid in your stomach to help with food breakdown. While you’re chewing, the food releases chemicals that travel up into your nose and triggers the olfactory (smell) receptors inside it.

When food goes into your mouth, chemical components navigate to your taste buds. Some react the most to sodium ions so you taste “salt.”  Others react mostly to sugar, acid, alkaloid or glutamate causing the taste to be “sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” or “umami.”

Try putting some food on your dry tongue. Bet you won’t taste a thing. What happens when your nose is totally stuffed from the rotten cold you got from who knows where?  You can’t taste your food, right?

Why Do I Like “Sweet” And My Friend Likes “Salty”?

Humans seem be hard-wired to like certain tastes and not others – probably a survival mechanism. Sour and bitter tastes often mean food that is bad, not ripe, or poisonous. Sweet, salty, and savory tastes often signal good, energy producing, electrolyte replacing foods.

But why do some people like chocolate and some vanilla — or salty crackers rather than animal crackers?  Who puts the grape flavor into purple lollipops and cheddar cheese flavor into cheese doodles?

There’s a whole industry of food chemists, called flavorists, who work to put the flavors you crave into food. They toil away in labs filled with extracts, powders, and chemicals, mixing and sniffing dozens of combinations until they have the perfect blend. They start with aroma and then tweak the taste.  The resulting flavors can then be used in anything from chips to frozen dinners.

Why Do Our Tastes Differ So Much If We All Have Taste Buds?

We all have favorite foods and others we don’t like.   You and your friend may disagree over coffee or strawberry; brussel sprouts or beets.

Scientists who study taste are finding that we probably taste things differently because our total number of taste buds varies.  Most people, with an average number of taste buds, are medium tasters and enjoy a range of flavors. Others, the nontasters, have a minimal sense of taste which may mean that they don’t enjoy eating. Others, the supertasters, can have 100 times more taste buds per square inch than nontasters making them extremely sensitive to certain tastes — and temperatures — of food. For supertasters, spicy, bitter, or sour foods can have a very strong or unpleasant taste, and sweets may be way too much.

We like what we eat for reasons having to do with flavors, taste, smell, temperature, and mouth feel.  Keep in mind that the food industry spends mega bucks flavoring and preparing foods to capitalize on these factors. Sniff the produce and baked goods at a farmer’s market. Think about the satisfying and flavors that are derived from nature – and baker’s ovens – and not concocted in a laboratory.  The choice is yours.  Eat well.

A Spooky Jack-o’-Lantern Tale

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A Jack-o’-Lantern Legend

The Jack-O’-Lantern comes from a legend that goes back hundreds of years in Irish history. As the story goes, a miserable old drunk named Stingy Jack, who liked to play tricks on his family, friends, and even the Devil, tricked the Devil into climbing up an apple tree.   Stingy Jack then put crosses around the apple tree’s trunk so the Devil couldn’t get down — but told the Devil that if he promised not to take his soul when he died he would remove the crosses and let the Devil down.

When Jack died, Saint Peter, at the pearly gates of Heaven, told him that he couldn’t enter Heaven because he was mean, cruel, and had led a miserable and worthless life. Stingy Jack then went down to Hell but the Devil wouldn’t take him in.  Jack was scared but with nowhere to go he had to wander around in the darkness between Heaven and Hell.

When Stingy Jack asked the Devil how he could get out without a light to see, the Devil threw him an ember from the flames of Hell. One of Jack’s favorite foods, which he always had when he could steal one, was a turnip.  So he put the ember into a hollowed out turnip and from that day on, Stingy Jack, without a resting place, roamed the earth lighting his way with his “Jack-O’-Lantern.”

All Hallows Eve

Halloween, or the Hallow E’en in Ireland and Scotland, is short for All Hallows Eve, or the night before All Hallows. On All Hallows Eve the Irish made Jack-O’-Lanterns by hollowing out turnips, rutabagas, gourds, potatoes, and beets and then putting lights in them to keep away both the evil spirits and Stingy Jack.  In the 1800′s when Irish immigrants came to America, they discovered that pumpkins were bigger and easier to carve, and the pumpkin became the Jack-o’-lantern.

If You Want To Eat Your Pumpkin . . .

Jumping from legend to fact:  pumpkins are Cucurbitaceae, a family of vegetables that includes cucumbers and melons. They are fat free and can be baked, steamed, or canned.

One cup of pumpkin has about 30 calories and is high in vitamin C, potassium, dietary fiber, and has other nutrients like folate, manganese, and omega 3′s.  Pumpkin is filled with the anti-oxidant beta-carotene which gives it its rich orange hue. It is versatile and can be added to baked goods and blended with many foods.

Pumpkin seeds are delicious and are a good source of iron, copper, and zinc.  Although pumpkin is low in calories, pumpkin seeds are not.   They have 126 calories in an ounce (about 85 seeds) and 285 calories in a cup.

Let A Baseball Be Your Guide

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It’s awfully hard to gauge how much food you’re putting on your plate – and even more difficult to figure out how much you’re popping into your mouth when you eat directly from a multi-serving bag of food.

Portion size is critical to managing your weight.  One helpful idea is to use commonplace objects as visual guides to “guesstimate” portion sizes.

One Cup Is About The Size Of A Baseball

The suggested serving size for many food items, particularly produce, is a cup. (The suggested portion size for many denser items, like pasta, rice, or ice cream is a half a cup, so two servings – which is what, at least, most of us eat, would equal a cup.)

 A Baseball, Not A Softball

A cup is about the size of a baseball – a baseball, not a softball.  So a cup of cooked greens, a cup of yogurt, a cup of beans, or a cup of cantaloupe should all look like the size of a baseball – but with obviously different calorie counts due to the food’s individual differences in food density and energy (calories).

Here are a few more of the CDC’s examples of one-cup servings:

  • 1 small apple
  • 1 medium grapefruit
  • 1 large orange
  • 1 medium pear
  • 8 large strawberries
  • 1 large bell pepper
  • 1 medium potato
  • 2 large stalks of celery
  • 12 baby carrots or 2 medium carrots
  • 1 large ear of corn