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The hot dog that rolls off the plate, the baby’s cookie that falls on the floor, the candy bar that slides across the table–we’re told we have five seconds to pick it up before it’s contaminated. Is this true?

Researcher Jorge Parada says, "A dropped item is immediately contaminated and can’t really be sanitized. When it comes to folklore, the ‘five-second rule’ should be replaced with ‘when in doubt, throw it out.’"

All items that come into contact with a surface pick up bacteria (and dirt!). How much bacteria and what kind of microbes depends on the object dropped and the surface it is dropped on.
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The US is going through the worst drought in half a century. Since we feed the world, this could lead to a global crisis as crop shortages push food prices up. The US supplies half the world’s corn exports and a large amount of its soybeans and wheat. We even sell Texas-grown rice to Asian countries.

In the July 20th edition of the Financial Times, Jack Farchy and Gregory Meyer quote senior commodities trader David Nelson as saying, "I’ve been in the business more than 30 years and this is by far and away the most serious weather issue and supply and demand problem that I have seen by a mile."
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In the future (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), it’s predicted that the population of the world will swell to 2.5 billion–how will we feed them all? Certainly not with the conventional meat-and-potatoes diet that we’re used to in the West, and we won’t be able to grow enough vegetables, either. We’ll have to find NEW KINDS of food to eat.
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