The dirtiest item in your kitchen is not what you'd think

You have different chopping boards for meat and veg. You diligently wash your hands as you go from task to task. You have your kitchen storage down to a fine art. Well done. But do you know what the dirtiest item in your kitchen is? If you answered sponge, tap handle or bin, you’re close but surprisingly not correct (although these items are pretty filthy, too). Food researchers at Kansas State University found that the hand towel is actually the dirtiest thing lurking in your kitchen. In fact, the humble kitchen hand towel is often crawling with enough bacteria that it can make you sick.

The study, published in Food Protection Trends, found that the kitchen hand towel is the leading cause of dangerous cross-contamination. The researchers watched videos of volunteers preparing food in a test kitchen to gather the information. The volunteers prepared recipes using raw beef or chicken, and a fruit salad. The raw meat had been coated in a harmless microorganism found in yoghurt so researchers could track the spread of germs. 

“Probably the most surprising things we saw were lack of hand washing and how people consistently over-handled towels – even wiping the counter with them,” says lead study author Jeannie Sneed, PhD, Kansas State University food safety specialist. “Towels were the most contaminated of all the contact surfaces we tested.”

Interestingly, the spread of germs did not stop there. Many of the participants checked their phones while cooking, which likely transferred germs from anywhere else they’d been, including the bathroom, to the kitchen towel and then their food. 

To measure the results, when meal prep was complete, researchers examined the fruit salad to determine how much of the microorganism had spread. The findings are astounding. Traces of the microorganism were found in 90 per cent of the fruit salads made during the experiment. Lesson to learn? While you think you are efficient and clean for wiping up as you cook in the kitchen, you are in fact spreading germs. To combat this problem and fight germs, researchers recommend paying close attention to the way you use your hand towels in the kitchen. And in most cases – if you’re preparing meat, for example – you should throw your hand towel in the washing basket at the end of the day.