Last week my daughter spent a couple of hours with her babysitter putting together some chicken enchiladas that turned out astoundingly well. I wolfed down a few for lunch, and was looking forward to several more after I got home from training my evening clients.

After I returned, Kate reached for the serving dish of enchiladas, which sat on top of the oven...and they all came crashing down on the floor.

Upon first seeing the pile of food and the broken casserole dish, I thought it might be possible to separate the food from the shards of glass. I mean, these enchiladas were seriously great. Besides, how bad can swallowing a few pieces of broken glass really be, after all? Is it really all that dangerous to have a handful of bits of razor-sharp, undigestible building material work its way through your intestines? 

But I thought better of it, swept up, and sent out for a pizza.

Short of having to sort through an indiscriminate pile of Tex-Mex and shattered glass, many of us face the dilemma of having to decide whether to eat or discard something that's fallen on the floor. Fortunately, some folks have come up with only a slightly tongue-in-cheek flow chart to help you decide:

According to the LA TIMES, where I found this chart, the 5-second rule should safely be renamed the 30-seconds rule; that's the time threshold after which it's likely your food will accrue dangerous levels of bacteria. Personally, I want to know what's so great about pumas that they can eat raw steak and I can't.