According to this article iin Slate, washing fruit/vegetables has the benefit of a single-log reduction of microbes living on its surface. Funny that we start talking about logarithmics, of all things, when we get a sudden outbreak of spinach poisoning.
...But even if you were to kill 90% of the e.coli on your bagged spinach, wouldn't the remaining 10% be enough to make you pretty sick? I wonder.
1 comment:
Interesting article.
While I'm normally all about 10x changes - in this case it does seem a little pointless. What strikes me is each time the bacteria reproduce the population doubles (right? - they do the whole asexual splitting thing I think) so it takes between 3 and 4 generations to get back to the original level. How often do bacteria reproduce? (I'm really asking I have no idea). I imagine it doesn't take very long.
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