Welcome to Risky or Not, a short podcast about everyday risk from germs. I'm Professor Ben Chapman from North Carolina State University, and I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Don Chaffner from Rutgers University. In this podcast, we promise to do our best not to waffle, dither, dissemble, or equivocate and to give you straight-up answers about whether something is risky or not. Don, today's topic caught my eye because it's something, I'm just going to come out and say, it's something that I've thought about doing, but I've never done. Oh. And, well, part of it is. So today's topic comes to us from, via LinkedIn, okay? This has got to be our first one. All of my news. This has got to be our first one. So, listener of the show, Jeff on LinkedIn sent you a message that said, hi, Don. I went to the movies the other day and just had to laugh or maybe cry at the cost of a tub of popcorn. It made me think about what if someone just ate someone else's leftover popcorn? Is that risky or not? And so I'm going to, Jeff's not here to clarify, but I'm going to imagine a situation where you roll into a movie theater and you search out near where the trash area is. There's usually a bunch of like half-eaten popcorn containers. I don't know what the, baskets. No, that's not the right word. Cartons, whatever. Like a container that you would eat popcorn out of. And, and I could see Jeff rolling in who I don't know and just grabbing one of those and then moving to a seat and eating it. And I, I too have seen, as I mentioned in the preamble, I too have seen leftover popcorn and thought maybe I, maybe I'll just grab some of that. And I've never, I've never actually done it, but I have, I have thought about this. So, yeah, but the question, you know, not, and, and not this, this is going to sound. hopefully this doesn't come out weird. Not because I'm worried about the cost of popcorn. I'm a, I'm a person of the cost is the cost, right? Like it, you know, I go to a hockey game. Beer is expensive. I will drink beer there because I'm at a hockey game and that's what I'm going to do. That's what, that's what beer costs at a hockey game. That's what it costs. Yeah. It's all part of the, it's all part of the situation, right? The parking's $40, whatever. It's what it costs. And it why I don go every night but I I definitely have also seen popcorn and thought you know what maybe I just eat some of this leftover popcorn And I never done it So I don know if that alluding to where I might be landing on risky or not on this But what do you think? Eating unknown sourced popcorn in a movie theater, risky or not? And I guess, I mean, we know the source, but the person who bought it and they've put their hands into it. Is it risky or not to eat the popcorn? Yeah. And I mean, the question, the canonical question that I wrote taken from from Jeff's post is eating someone else's leftover popcorn at the movies because it's too expensive. We'll take the too expensive off because it's it's not relevant. But that was the context. I don't go to the movies that much. I don't. And God, the portion sizes are completely out of control. Like, I don't want. I understand fully why there's leftover popcorn, because they want to charge you a lot of money and then give you a huge amount of popcorn. I would pay less money, but still too much, just to have a normal-sized container of popcorn, right? Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, there's a reason why I don't go to the movies very much. And then also I don't like people. And we have a television that gets lots of very good movies that I can watch in my house and have popcorn or whatever else I want. I only have to share with my wife and dogs and not after the dog. So, yeah. So, I mean, I guess that thinking about it, yes, somebody's grubby little hands have been in that popcorn. Maybe if they're eating like the Michael Jackson video of people, somebody eating popcorn, if they're kind of throwing in their mouth and then pieces are hitting their mouth and maybe falling out of their mouth. So maybe some potential saliva contamination. It's just gross. And I would never do it. I just don't, I don't think it's that risky. Now, again, you, you're, you will raise your, you know, your, your very famous norovirus concern, I'm sure about this, but I just, I mean, this, I would, I would put this in the same category as all of the other things that you have a norovirus concern about. Well, and this is going to surprise you. Maybe. I don't think so. My norovirus concern is, all right, there's a direct line where we're eating someone else's saliva, right? If we look back at the historical ones that I've moved on, it's like you're consuming some of the saliva. This one, I think it's a stretch to think that someone's thrown into their mouth and there's some saliva getting on the popcorn and then it's ending up back in there. So I'm going to take that. I think that's unlikely to happen. I think that this is not risky. I think hand contamination is a much more likely route here. And that when, when you kind of kind of model yourself, if you close your eyes, Don, if you think about putting your hand into a bag of popcorn, you definitely touching your fingertips are touching more than what you consuming more than what you consuming Yes this is very true But even that being said I don think that the likelihood of transferring you know whatever is on someone fingers to other pieces of popcorn and then that getting consumed as I eat the leftovers, I don't think that that's really very, I don't think that's very risky. And, and I've been in, I don't think that, I don't think it's likely likely to happen that there's pathogen there and it leads to transfer an illness and transfer consumption in the nose i i think that this kind of thing happens quite a bit in like parties and uh oh good point yeah like maybe not not so much in you know it's it's certainly other people you know but but i like i've been to you know many parties where someone just puts a bowl of chips out and and it's not like you're scooping those chips out with a with a scoop and then putting them on a plate, it's like, oh, people are putting their hands into a common bowl. And I can't think of any examples of that leading to illnesses that we know of or that have been identified in an outbreak. So I think something like this actually happens quite a bit. People with unknown potential contamination on their hands, and we just don't see the actual illnesses. So I'm going to say not risky. Interesting. Yeah. And I'll say too, like we'll link to the, What I think of as the canonical norovirus one, which was episode 316, which is a question from Matt, Chef Matt, who's been a guest on Food Safety Talk, where he was asking about cups to scoop water out of a shared bowl. And you were risky and I was not risky. And then we'll also link to Paul Dawson's paper on double dipping because it's sort of like double dipping. And they actually did quite a nice job, I thought, of assessing the contamination. And for sure, they did show some saliva transfer, but obviously they showed some microbial counts that they inferred were from saliva, which I think is quite reasonable. But yeah, again, I would not do it and it's gross, but I don't really think it's risky. Yeah, agreed. Did you, are you, yeah, you're linking to the Paul Dawson double dipping paper for Journal of Food Safety. Okay, good. Yeah. That's the one. Yep. Yep. And I just found another bunch of other like coverages behind, you know, of that, of that paper. But I think that actual paper is good. Yeah. Just link to the literature. Yeah. If we can. Yeah. You know, just in unrelated things that we should, shouldn't spend too much time on, but it's very annoying when I try to access Google Scholar at work from Safari, I get a message and I can't access it. I have, don't have the problem at home. It's only at work. And it a weird problem that says you are sending too many requests or something like that It very weird I wish it would stop but I don care enough to make it stop Stop sending so many requests. You can get your paper. Yeah. What does it say? It says, our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Well, that would make sense. Please try your request again later. I never, I try it again later all the time. I never, it never works, but it's a minor inconvenience. Well, hey, you talking about that gave me some time to find a link to a local news story here in North Carolina that both quotes Paul Dawson as well as the very famous Dr. Don Schaffner. Oh, look at that. How about that? Yeah. So there you go. And there was, where was the Schaffner? There was a good quote here from Don Schaffner. Relatively speaking, these are going to be rare events. We obviously don't see a lot of disease outbreaks from this, but people do need to be aware of the problem and evaluate their level of risk based on the situation. There you go. That sounds like something I would say. It does. Yeah, it sounds really good. So, all right. Well, we're two not riskies for our leftover popcorn and eating it and finding it at the movie theater. This has been another episode of Risky or Not. If you have questions for us, you can reach me, Professor Ben Chapman, at Benjamin Chapman on Twitter, The X, or at Ben Chapman NCSU on Blue Sky, or my co-host, Dr. Don Chapman, and Bud Counter on all the social medias. But really, we prefer that you send your questions to us and any feedback you might have to us through our website at whiskeyornot.com. to the hospital for someone. Our customers. Wow. Ourselves. All right. Our chicken. All right. And our reputation. All right, all right. You mean bacteria on me right now? Clean, clean, and then clean again. Bacteria. Bacteria. Look, there's bacteria. Bacteria. Bacteria. You might not see them, but they're there. Bacteria. Bacteria. Everything you touch. Bacteria. Bacteria. That's right. Salmonella back to you. Salmonella back to you. Salmonella back to you. And you could send us feedback, but, you know, probably we won't read it. And we won't really discuss it on this show. We might make a snarky comment to each other about it. But not, probably not, sometimes publicly. But we try to protect the innocent. And it might be anonymous, but it might not be. and and the guilty and the stupid we protect them all yeah yeah yeah we'll protect we're we're protectors
