They're everywhere!

As most of you knew, there are over 100,000,000 microbes on your average kitchen sponge. The range is more like 15,000,000 to 200,000,000, but either way, ew. We also tested water from bagged lettuce (around 100,000 microbes) and a gram of raw, ground turkey (around 1,000). The day we did this experiment, I came home and cleaned my kitchen like I've never cleaned before.

There are a couple of things you can do to keep the microbe count down, like wash your sponge in the dishwasher or microwave it in a bowl of water for a couple of minutes. Since we all aren't sick all the time, it's pretty obvious that most of the microbes aren't pathogenic. Something like 75% of raw poultry in supermarkets is contaminated with camphlyobacter (causes food poisoning) and about 25% is contaminated with salmonella. If you use your sponge to clean up after preparing raw meat, make sure to decontaminate your sponge, or you could be spreading all around your kitchen the next time you wipe your table.

Happy cleaning!