Spilled Food - a Hazard at the Wheel

That innocent candy bar could be as dangerous as a high-speed blowout.

Chocolate smears everything a driver touches. The instinctive reaction is to clean it off immediately, stealing attention from the road. Then-bang-a food-related wreck.

That’s why chocolate is on a list of 10 most-dangerous foods to consume while driving, the result of research by an insurance company.

“When we looked into it (a damage claim), we found that the guy’s license was restricted having no food within reach while driving,” Hagerty Classic Insurance President McKeel Hagerty said. The man had a number of food wrecks. That, plus claims for food damage to interiors of collectible cars, prompted Hagerty to “dig deeper. We were amazed.”

It’s more the spilling than the eating. Most food accidents happen in the morning. Drivers en route to work are worried about wearing food-stained clothes all day, so they urgently try to clean spills but crash instead, Hagerty surmises. Hot coffee is infamously dangerous. It is the worst offender on the company’s list.

“We know that eating is a big problem,” but be careful about branding it the new villain, warns Michael Goodman, chief of driver behavior research at NHTSA. “It’s a lot easier for an investigating officer to identify food as a cause because the evidence is everywhere.” In the case of cell phones and other distractions, experts say there is often no evidence.

Fast-food merchants are on the case. More drive-through foods are packaged to fit cup holders. And products have been changed to improve what Taco Bell spokeswoman Laurie Gannon calls “portability.” Her chain has adopted “thicker shredder cheese, crunchier taco shells, improved packaging.”

What to avoid while driving.
From worst to not-so-bad, the most dangerous:
1. Coffee
2. Hot soup
3. Tacos
4. Chili-covered food
5. Juicy hamburgers
6. Barbeque
7. Fried Chicken
8. Jelly-cream filled doughnuts
9. Soft drinks
10. Chocolate

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