On those bags of chopped, washed, mixed lettuce
I’m so old I can remember when you had to wash and dry lettuce by hand. What a pain in the neck that was.
Then came a fabulous invention: the salad spinner. Salad spinners may seem pretty primitive to you younguns, but I can assure you that when they first came out they seemed like a marvelous advance.
Then, wonder of wonders, came bagged and washed lettuce mixes of all types. What convenience!
But it turns out that all is not wonderful with those little baggies, after all:
“Mass-produced chopped, bagged lettuce that gets shipped around the US amplifies the risk of poisoning,” [Marler, a food safety attorney] said.
Instead of shipping heads of lettuce or large carrot sticks that people wash, we chop them and mix them up in processing, then package them in plastic bags. In that process, Marler said, “The bacteria has a chance to grow. And a lot of people get sick.”
This prepackaging makes it harder to find the cause of a food poisoning outbreak. Different lettuces grown at different farms get mixed into bags that are distributed at supermarkets and restaurants all over the country, so food safety officials need to search for the common link among suppliers.
“When it gets processed, you might have four to five farms supplying the processor on any day. So was it farmer one, two, three, or four that was contaminated?” Marler asked. It also means that when something goes awry in a batch, it can cause a very widespread problem ”” like the one we’re seeing now [with romaine].
…“I think the [question] is: Is the convenience worth the risk?”
That indeed is the question.
E. coli is dangerous and can even kill. That said, it is very rare for a person to die from it. For example, so far in the recent romaine lettuce outbreak no deaths have been reported. I don’t eat romaine lettuce ordinarily, but there’s nothing special about romaine that predisposes it to the problem, so avoiding romaine is not the solution, except temporarily. I probably won’t be going back to the old rip-soak-and-spin method any time soon, though.
Actually, the tried-and-tested way to dry lettuce without a salad spinner is to place the wet lettuce in a dry towel (not too small), close up the towel by grabbing all four corners (with the lettuce inside) and then swing that sucker (i.e., the towel with the lettuce inside it) around and around with all your might.
Yes, fun with with centripetal force.
(Think of Roy Rogers or John Wayne with a lasso.)
Hints:
1. Don’t let go of the towel in mid-swing.
2. Remember to check all around you before you start swinging.
3. Don’t swing the towel so hard that you dislocate your shoulder or develop “lettuce elbow”. (Sort of takes the fun out of it.)
Appendix:
When you’re finished swinging, place the towel on a flat surface, open it up, and—presto—the lettuce should be (mostly) dry. If it’s not dry, get a new towel and start again.
Since we grow all the lettuce (and spinach) we eat year round we never worry about e coli. We do wash, spin, and tear. Salad is often on the menu.
2 words: Salad Shooter
I thought I saw something about kidney failure (or disease) in some of the sickened consumers…While I buy bagged butter lettuce, I buy the whole hydroponic “living lettuce” butter more frequently.But I’ll have my garden starting, and to buy a lot of produce from an organic farm 10 minutes down the road.I LOVE my salad spinner!
Well, I still eat iceberg lettuce. 1) cut out the core or stem. 2) run cold water in it for a minute or two. 3) turn it over and let it drain for half an hour. 4) pat dry with paper towel.
Spinning washed lettuce in a towel is fun for kiddos helping make dinner. But for some reason my parents preferred we do it outside 😀
big deal.. our liberal overlords do not think much about germs and things like that… or did you recently hear all the new diseases in the US we are now being equalized to having? like malaria, dengue, scarlet fever… how long before the first case of leishmaniasis? not like we are stupid idiot racists like our grandparents who refused to take in the mentally ill, the politically at war, or the diseased…
after the ladies took over, everything from school, college, reading scores, weight, nutrition, food diseases, and on and on just had a field day swimming in denial a river through hegypt dem a old place in the fertile crescent…
/sarcasm off
on another note, anyone other than me know lettuce is a hallucinogen? [Lactucarium but hey.. knowledge is not power, power is power… you can rent knowledge… it often comes cheap]
Actually, most e. coli strains are harmless. However since e. coli is normally found in the large intestine, finding it in food is a bad indication and indicates the food has become contaminated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli
My wife washes those pre-packaged salads. She stopped buying the Costco Caesar salad because the lettuce couldn’t be washed. I’m not sure if it helps enough. If i do get sick and a salad is suspect, I’ll try to let you know.
As the French say when confronted with the inevitable warning of murder, insanity, death that accompanies any real upgrade in daily life, “Jamais une rose sans une épine.”
Still using my salad spinner. As for the bagged salads – can’t stand them! They are overpriced for what little you get and go bad very quickly.
Anytime I have bought those bagged salads they turn to mush within a couple of days. Not tasty or “crunchy” at all.
Seriously, if you want to keep lettuce (any variety) fresh, then do NOT cut it with a knife. Just tear it and it will last longer.
I’ll often tear up some iceberg and romaine on Sunday night, along with cutting up carrots, peppers, etc. Store them, separately, in Tupperware (do they even sell that brand any more?) and just pour out a little from each container for salad each night all week.
Certainly cheaper, and fresher than the bagged stuff; with little prep work (less than an hour each week).
it was never a “safe to eat or not” issue with me; but, it is now!
E coli may not kill you but trust me, if you ever get sick from e coli you will wish you were dead (until you get better).
The risk to health is quite low, but my wife and I got into the habit of using “fresh” ingredients many years ago when they were relatively inexpensive and the packaged stuff was unavailable. I use the quotation marks around fresh because we live in the Boston area and so for several months a year the fresh vegetables are from big farms far, far away. The implication there is that the contamination risk is less, due to the packaging, but not zero.
I don’t know what is available in the US anymore, but here in this third world hellhole of Western Australia we call Romaine lettuce Cos (with a long o). It is sold mature with big floppy leaves unlike the cute little ‘hearts of romaine’ my sister in the US favours. It is grown in the actual ground because there is often a bit of sand at the base of the outer leaves, which I remove with my thumb. .I confess I don’t wash it and I then cut it up with a knife. Yes, I am a confirmed bachelor and a philistine. 😉
“I confess I don’t wash it…”
Just think of all that marvelous vitamin B12 you’re not removing….
We have a local aquaponics business that produces all sorts of lettuces and vegetables year round. They supply local restaurants and donate to the school districts in our county.
My sister puts washed and torn lettuce in a clean pillowcase and does the whirling around with it to remove most of the water.
I use a salad spinner and do not cut it with a knife unless I’m making a “chopped” salad to eat immediately. Otherwise, I tear it up, wrap it loosely in paper towels and store in the frig in an unsealed food baggie.
As one who has had food poisoning (don’t know the cause) complete with 1 1/2 hour trip to an emergency room, I am very careful with fresh produce. We were vacationing
E.coli digests meat. Your body is made of meat. If E.coli isn’t held back by the layer of mucus lining your intestines, it will happily start digesting you, a condition typically called necrotizing fasciitis.
Mucus membranes are actually quite a bit more effective than skin at preventing pathogens from penetrating them, mostly because immune cells can survive and move about freely in mucus, and they can’t do so in the epidermis. But mucus also has the significant disadvantage of having to be kept moist in order to function, which is why only fish and amphibians have evolved mucal coatings on the outside of our bodies, while other land creatures evolved to only produce coatings on their internal surfaces, and depend on their water-tight skins for pathogen defense on the outer surface.
The point of all this is, there’s no such thing as a perfect defense, and some strains of E.coli have evolved means to penetrate the mucus membranes of our gastrointestinal tracts, and start necrotizing away at meat we don’t want digested.