Stumble It!
Petri dish conclusions. Well that’s just disgusting.
I’ve declared an end to the petri dish experiment for now, since I can’t stand it anymore. The verdict is in: the most disgusting thing in my house? The kitchen sponge.
Kitchen sponge vs. toilet water.
The dish on the left is from an – admittedly thoroughly used – kitchen sponge. The right? A swab of water from the toilet. On the plus side, I apparently keep an impeccably clean bathroom. On the other hand, that sponge could repopulate the earth after a nuclear holocaust. And I like to think that I keep a pretty clean kitchen, as far as these things go.
I threw out that sponge. Had it bleached. Burned. Buried at midnight in an unmarked grave. With a stake through its heart.
To continue the theme, here are swabs from the bathroom and kitchen sinks.
Bathroom sink (left) and kitchen sink.
Yeah. I’m going to have to have the kitchen burned. That’s horrible.
Redemption
Now, before you call the health department, I would like to present an exhibit in my defense. Here is a pot that was used that very evening for food preparation, left to soak in the sink, then cleaned with hot water, soap and that very sponge.
The pot of redemption
The pot is shown here next to our control dish. We actually did two controls – one blank, untouched dish of agar, and this one which we touched with an unused swab from the container, in case one of the kind people at Q-Tip HQ sneezed as these were being packaged. Clever, no?
In other and better news, our cats are squeaky clean.
Clockwise from top left: Lucia, Mourka, Spouse, me.
Swabs of the girls’ mouths resulted in almost no growth, after one week of cultivation. Spouse’s dish is speckled quite evenly with tiny spots (he’s all about geometric precision), mine has just two or three dots of different colors. Feeling pretty good about this one.
Issues
Naturally, it’s not a totally sound experiment for any number of reasons. One of which is the fact that it was just me lurching around my house with a box of cotton swabs, a tiny tube of agar powder and a carton of beef broth. Also, without any ability to identify the growth in the dishes, we could be producing colonies of Concentrated Cleanliness for all I know.
Next time? I’ll take a used sponge, cut it into pieces and try a couple of cleaning theories on the bits.
By way of reference:
But first, I’ve got to go start comparison shopping for autoclaves.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 16th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I wonder how a natural sea sponge would measure up to a kitchen sponge. I read somewhere that natural enzymes in sea sponges prevent or maybe just inhibit the growth of bacteria.
March 16th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Wowswers… I knew kitchen sponges were dirty, but that is impressive. If you still have any extras, maybe we could see the mic half of a phone, (heard those were pretty nasty, and proximity to our lips would add to the drama…) and maybe also form the nutgraf keyboard, (and see how dirty the machine that creates these pages are)…
March 18th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
so, have you been compulsively microwaving and dishwashing your sponge?
April 6th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
10% of our body weight comes from microorganism that we can’t live with out it.
April 11th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I just read this and then used three bottles of Windex cleaning everything in our house and then set our block on fire because that is the only way to Cleanliness and Redemption.
Here is a follow-up experiment you should under no circumstances ever think of doing: if you put Neosporin on the colonized petri dishes it will create a soothing circular zone of eradication and cleanliness, and then after 3-4 days some new bacteria will grow within this Safe Zone, and then you will have made NEOSPORIN-RESISTANT BACTERIA, and you will feel like an imnipotent dety, but I will have to come down there and end you.