Picture this. You are having a delightful lunch with your best friend when a fly lands on your pizza. Its feet are stuck in the cheese. What do you do? Should you continue to eat without care or should you simply toss your food? Eight out of ten times, you must have been guilty of downing everything on your plate. Thank your immune system if nothing happened to you, but if you ever suffered from food-borne diseases, you can the hold flies responsible.
What Happens When A Fly Land on Your Food?
You may not know this but houseflies are unable to choose solid foods because they are physically incapable of biting down. Their mouths are specifically build to suck up food like juices and smoothies. So when they want to eat solid food they are forced to leave saliva on the food, making it soft enough to suck up with their little horse mouths. Because flies can't chew (who knew?), they have to throw up enzymes onto their food, which dissolves the food so they may slurp it up. Can Eating From A Food Truck Make You Sick?
Does Fly Contaminate Your Food?
What makes this extra gross is that the saliva could contain remnants from their previous meals. For your information, flies like to eat things that we consider revolting such as trash and rotting animal carcasses and faeces. So your meal might be getting covered with bacteria and pathogens picked up from toilets, raw meat, and garbage. It can't get worse right? Wrong. They can contaminate your meal even before they leave their saliva. The real danger in a fly landing on your food actually has to do with the insect's body. The hairs on the fly's body can transfer bacteria from wherever they were before. Maybe it was a flower or maybe it was a pile of dog poop. Here's How Eating Leftover Food Could Be Damaging Your Health.
Should You Continue Eating Your Meal?
That brings us to the question, should you eat your meal if a fly lands on it? Well, a healthy immune system can usually take care of the small amount of bacteria flies carry, you should toss your food immediately if a fly lands on it. Rather than letting a fly leave cholera, dysentery and typhoid-causing bacteria on your food, you should probably just toss anything they land on. Meat Safety: The Right Way to Buy, Store and Cook Meat to Avoid Falling Sick.
Arguably the most unpalatable aspect of a fly landing on your food is the fact it will nearly always leave a little vomit on your food too. This should be a good reason to convince you to toss any food contaminated by fly.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Oct 03, 2019 04:09 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).