Unlearning the ‘Five Minutes Rule’ Helped Me Embrace Change

It's lunchtime and you dropped your fried wonton on your lap. You contemplate whether to pick it up or not, but then you pop it into your mouth anyway and say: "five minutes rule". What's new?

Sep 11, 2023

Halo everyone, happy Monday!

Today’s newsletter is an essay that questions the infamous ‘five seconds rule’ or in Indonesia, it’s five minutes. I’ll be talking about:

✋ What exactly is the ‘five minutes rule’

🌀 Why do we still do that despite fully knowing the risk

🧠 A personal experience of mine that teaches me the importance of unlearning

This is you picking up a fried wonton from the floor. (Illustation by Fasya Tumbuan)

If you were to eat with me, it wouldn’t take you long to know that I take food seriously. You’ll know it from the time I spend browsing the menu, the sort of questions I ask the restaurant’s staff, or from how I start perfecting my own concoction of soy sauce, wasabi, and red chili flakes the second I put in my sushi orders. It’s almost like a routine. A 12-step premeal routine.

But despite all of these precautionary actions to get the best out of my dining experience, sometimes, accidents do happen. Like that one time when I ordered a latte in Bologna, fully expecting a cup of coffee and definitely not a cup of steaming hot milk, or that one time when I just went for a level 10 curry at CoCo Ichibanya because I was so confident with my Indonesian spice tolerance. But once in a while, accidents also come in the form of dropping food on the table, or worse on the ground.

Imagine it’s lunchtime and you’re having a good time with your friends in a noodle stall nearby. You’ve been waiting for 20 minutes for your bowl of noodle and fried wontons to arrive, and they’re finally here. The noodle is still hot, so you said to yourself that you’ll go for the wonton first. But the moment your chopsticks picked those perfectly crisp, golden brown wontons, it slipped. It hit the edge of the table first and now it’s on your lap.

This is a tricky situation and I would say that my stance on this is conditional. There are usually two factors that I would consider before picking the food back on my plate. First, what kind of food was it? and second, where did it land? For example, I would easily pop the fried wonton back into my mouth if it were to land on a table that was cleaned right before I sat there. The food is dry and the table is clean. No brainer. Heck, I would still eat it if it were to land on my lap. But switch it up to a piece of steamed wonton that fell straight to the ground. That shit is full of bacteria that I can’t pronounce, and I would not be caught dead popping those into my mouth.

But if you think that the rule above makes no sense and is arbitrary, hold my iced tea and say hi to the ‘five minutes rule’.

Yes, you heard it right, it’s five minutes and not five seconds. At least that’s what we believe in Indonesia - that it takes five minutes for bacteria to get to our food and contaminate them. This rule is so ingrained in our minds that it occasionally will veto all the other rules. All we need to do is to say the magic word: “belum lima menit” (it’s not yet five minutes), and just like that, the bacteria are found jobless. Now, I have the social pass to pick my wonton up from my lap and eat it without being judged or seen as some unhygienic and barbaric person who doesn’t understand how bacteria works.

It’s funny because I did not make this scenario up. It’s me, I’m that person who will say the magic word, and maybe also try to blow some microscopic dust off of my wonton and wipe it with a dry napkin. At least for me, these are the bare minimum for me to feel safe to eat the dropped food.

This process of repicking a dropped food is what I call an automatic action. It’s something that we do instantly and over and over again, without even thinking of why we are doing it.

While the consequences are obvious (food poisoning, just in case it’s not that obvious to you), it’s interesting that we somehow, collectively think that the risks of eating contaminated food are too small for us to worry about. It’s almost like the idea of your body suffering the next two days is still better than missing the chance to eat that warm crunchy pocket of goodness. TLDR: Risk < Value.

Unfortunately, and I hate to break it to you, it takes less than five seconds (it happened almost immediately) for bacteria to contaminate your food and there are other places that you should worry about more than the floor. Does it change how I see bacteria work? Yes. But will it stop me from following the ‘five minutes rule’? Probably not. Not today. Not tomorrow.

No matter how many reality slaps, it will still be hard for one to flag the danger when they are still living in an environment where the said danger is being normalized.

It’s so much easier for me to just pop that clean-looking, seemingly untouched wonton into my mouth than having to explain to my friends that I don’t feel safe eating it. Ten out of ten my friend would eat it instead and made me sad that I didn’t get to eat my wonton.

Now I’m not saying that the ‘five minutes rule’ is unchangeable. Just like any other culture, this rule is a result of one behavior being passed down hundreds and hundreds of years through multiple generations. You probably first heard about the ‘five minutes rule’ from your parents and so do they from their parents. Therefore, it would not be a surprise if we also need a while to stop doing it. Culture is manmade after all.

What’s effective is not for us to debate how bacteria work or under which specific conditions it is okay for us to eat a dropped food, but it’s for us to start realizing the importance of unlearning.

It’s for us to admit that what we believed all this time might not be entirely true and accurate, and for us to gather ourselves to let go of that belief.

For a simple thing like the ‘five minutes rule’, unlearning could feel just like peeling off layers of an onion with each one revealing a new fresh truth. All you need to do is to just pause yourself the minute you drop your food and say: “My friend can have this bacteria-filled wonton instead of me”. It sucks - both to not have your wonton and get your friend food-poisoned. But chances are, your friend would probably also change their mind seeing you offer them a wonton from your warm sweaty lap.

On the other hand, unlearning a more complex or personal thing could be painful.

For example, I remember that it was very hard for me to accept that I was hanging out with a toxic friend who turned me into a people pleaser. One that doesn’t ask how I am, doesn’t initiate plans, and would generally just show up only when they need to vent. At first, seeing this behavior made me feel like I needed to put more energy into maintaining this friendship - like sending hangout invites every two weeks because I fully know that we won’t be having our regular iced coffees if I don’t do it. Not only that this put all of the responsibility on my end, but it also meant that I gave them permission to get away with this behavior. In other words, I tolerate them treating me badly.

Unlearning could feel like a resistance and also a vengeance. In my case, the first step was for me to painfully realize that I never put myself first. It was tough to ask myself “How can I be so unaware?”, and it took years for me to finally say to this friend that I expect ABC and not XYZ from our friendship. I then went through an era where I always prioritized my needs first, like taking frequent social breaks for me to spend time with myself. But just when I thought this was over, I found myself in an extreme self-care era where I unconsciously held myself back from putting too much energy into a relationship - so that I wouldn’t return to where I started. Which is not healthy. So now, it’s time for another round of unlearning!

If it takes years for many of us to simply stop accepting the ‘five minutes rule’, imagine how long would it take for us to unlearn something about ourselves or something that is perpetuated systemically.

Hmm. Food for thought. Yummy.