Here's why bagged salads are bad for you.
It pains me to say this, because I’m lazy. But
after the umpteenth outbreak of food poisoning from bags of freshly
washed greenery, I think it’s time we all stop eating bagged salads.
According to a 2015 government report, fruit and vegetables are the #1 source of Listeria and Salmonella food poisoning, and a close #2 (sorry) for E. coli. But there’s something about bagged lettuce that makes it worse than your average vegetable. Emily Bazelon explains, writing at Slate in the aftermath of an earlier E. coli outbreak:
To produce the bags, processing plants take greens from different farms, put them through three different chlorinated baths, dry and seal them in plastic, and then ship them to a market near you. The chlorination doesn’t get rid of E. coli: To do that, you need to heat the leaves and treat them with an organic acid, which would probably make them go limp. So, by mixing greens from different farms without treating them for contamination, the processing of bagged spinach spreads E. coli once it’s present in a particular field.
The current outbreak bears this out: the Listeria cases were spread over eight states and five Canadian provinces. Here’s where Food Poisoning Bulletin said the batch of lettuce in question ended up:
The salads have been known to have been distributed to the following states, but there may have been further distribution to other states. The states that received the salads include, but are not limited to: Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The salads were sold at Giant, Kroger, ALDI, Price Chopper, Walmart, Fred Meyer, Schnucks, Meijer, ShopRite, Stop n Shop, Food 4 Less, Jay C, FoodsCo, PriceRite and other stores.
This is why I’m switching back to preparing my own salads. There’s nothing you can really do if a bag of salad comes in with bacteria on it: washing it will just spread the germs around but still leave most of them alive. (If you want to wash it anyway, a vinegar solution is slightly more effective than plain water.) A single head of lettuce or bunch of spinach could still be contaminated at its source, but it’s less likely to have been swimming with lettuce from halfway across the country.
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By Beth Skwarecki via Family Life Goals
