Uh oh. Another salad scare
September 18, 2007
This time it’s E. coli in bagged salads from Dole. I recently visited the packing plant where the contaminated spinach originated a year ago and could not believe the state-of-the-art testing and holding prodedures that company put in place. Everybody needs to be doing this sort of thing. This is why federal regulations, imperfect as they are, so badly need to be instituted.
State-of-the art processing technology and still contamination is possible. Why are we so hooked on the convenience of bagged produce? Have we forgotten how to wash and rinse salad lettuce? Have our vegetable peelers and knives rusted away? Is the few seconds we save preparing our produce at home worth the worry and risk of getting sick?
We can’t regulate this problem away because it is an integral part of the huge, labyrinth industrial food system. Despite all the improvements in procesing technology, contamination problems continue to grow. Carrot bunches like the ones under Marion’s hand in the photo are a better option.
Comment by Anna — September 19, 2007 @ 4:11 am
I don’t think it matters whether the salad is bagged or not. IIRC, the last time this happened the contamination arose in the field, not the processing plant. And if, as suspected, the problem was dirty irrigation water, no amount of washing at home would get the e. coli off the greens.
I do most of my cooking from scratch, and I’m quite capable of peeling my own carrots, but I still like the convenience of bagged greens. When I’m in a hurry, they make fixing a salad as quick as making a sandwich, which gives me an incentive to do the right (nutritional) thing. So that’s one convenience food I don’t deplore.
And I rinse everything, even bagged greens, because you never know where it’s been.
Comment by Brigid — September 19, 2007 @ 6:46 am
Yes, contamination can begin in the field, in which case washing and rinsing are futile because the contamination is *in* the plants, not just on the surface (so it can’t be rinse or washed away). But it is industrial agriculture that has made field contamination the issue that it is. Typically prepackaged bagged salads come from industrial monoculture because only large scale operations can absorb the high cost of processing and new safety infrastructure requirements.
Buying local produce from small producers drastically reduces the chance of contamination. Even if contamination were to occur, the traceability is far easier, the number of affected people is far smaller, and the economic damage is far less.
Other benefits to local produce are freshness (local is faster from farm to table by a long shot), and economic strength for both local agriculture and the local overall economy. Why send your money away to growers and processors umpteen states and hundreds if not thousands of miles away when your local farmers are *struggling to survive* and can grow the same things in your community? So you can save a few minutes to wash? There’s far more involved bagged prepared produce than is it safe to eat.
Even safer is growing a bit of salad at home. Lettuce can be grown easily in pots or a small raise garden, for at least some of the year. Square Foot Gardening (www.squarefootgardening.com/) and other simplified gardening methods are great ways to produce one’s own crops without a lot of labor, tools, or time. I have a huge pot of rainbow chard on my front patio and get lots of comments on how attractive it is, yet it is edible, too.
I get my most of my salad greens from my local CSA farm share box and wash them all at once, run them through the salad spinner, then store them in the fridge in reusable containers. It really only takes a few minutes. The rest of the week I have “bagged” salad convenience, too. Much cheaper, too. A bit of cores and outer leaves for the compost or worm bin and no trash to discard. I used to be a bagged salad junkie, too, but honestly, it took about 2 or 3 times of washing salad again to “rehab” back to washing it myself. Now I don’t even remember what I used to do with those few minutes of time. Oh yeah, I was standing in line at the grocery store, trying not to read the covers of the tabloids.
Comment by Anna — September 19, 2007 @ 12:26 pm