So you think your pre-washed lettuce is clean?

[Salem]

Always, always, always wash it. I fill my salad spinner up with water, put the bagged stuff in there and let it set while I chop tomatos, onions, and what ever else I'm going to add to the salad. Then I swish the lettuce around some, empty out the water, hold the lettuce under the faucet for a minute or so and then spin it dry. You can see the water in the salad spinner is dirty before I dump it out.

I wash the stuff even when it says it has been triple washed already.

Salem

 

[passionflower]

I saw a TV program on the news and never buy it now.
I soak my lettuce like my grandmother did. with a little salt,,,,,,

 

[Salem]

No I sure didn't think it, B.

You can wash all your fruits and veggies with baking soda. I especially do this with the bagged stuff. Those little baby carrots and such.

Even oranges I'll scrub the outside of them with some baking soda. You're not eating the peel of course, BUT it goes in your mouth as you eat it. Prior to buying them they're sitting in one of those dirty baskets or cart. Even if they're in plastic Lord only knows where they were last.

Then again this is just me. My mom has a lousey, nasty autoimmune disease so I try to be careful with everything. It's all gross. I wonder at the miracles of baking soda though.

Filly - I've never heard of this. How do you do it? Do you put a little baking soda in the water when you wash/soak the lettuce? For the orange, do you just put some baking soda on a vegetable brush and scrub and rinse?

I want to do this too. I hate the thought of dirty food.

TIA,

Salem

 

[believe09]

The inmates at the jail I work at eat pre-packaged salads.
Lets hope Casey A, Misty and Ron are also.

VB

My kids want to know why I am shrieking with laughter!!!!!!!!

 

[hockeymom]

Okay, so it might not be exactly the same thing, but I once found 1/2 a grasshopper in a bag of the ready-to-use, prewashed hearts of romaine...

Luckily I noticed it while I was dumping the romaine into the sink for a rinse...

Crouton?

 

[jon_burrows]

Oh geez, take one guess what I'm eating right at this very moment.

I hear ya. I'm eating prewashed organic spinach. I finally started feeling safe eating it again and now this. Before the spinach disaster we would go through three bags a week.

 

[teedie2]

I'm not reading that article because I'll throw up. But this is why I don't buy that stuff. I just don't trust that it's clean. I wash EVERYTHING before eating/cooking it. I wash watermelons with soap and water before I cut into them. Think about it - this stuff goes from being picked or whatever, into bins and bags and trucks and you have no clue how many dirty, nasty, poopy hands touch them. Yuck, yuck, yuck. When it comes to my food, I'm not going to assume it's clean unless I have washed it myself.

I'm going to print your post and frame it and hang in the kitchen .. making sure that my DH sees it.

I'm really happy to know that someone else washes their watermelons with soapy water. So, that makes at least two of us. LOL.

Once I bought a bag of pre-washed mustard greens .. hah! I opened the bag, and right there on the top layer was a big glob of bird poopy. Pre-washed, indeed!

At a cafeteria I asked for a side of spinach greens. It was passed to me with a ladybug (dead, cooked, in fact) perched right on the top.

Once I bought a hamburger for lunch, and it had quite a lot of lettuce on it, so I opened it up to remove some of the lettuce. When I started taking lettuce off, I found mold ... thick, fuzzy mold ... between the layers.

Pays to watch your food, at home and when eating out.

 

[azwriter]

Okay, so it might not be exactly the same thing, but I once found 1/2 a grasshopper in a bag of the ready-to-use, prewashed hearts of romaine...

Luckily I noticed it while I was dumping the romaine into the sink for a rinse...

Those grasshoppers are good if you fix 'em right.
I should not be joking about that. I spent 5 days in the hospital a few years ago, hooked up to a round the clock IV with an EColi infection in my kidneys. You don't even want to think about having something like that. Recovery took a long time.
WASH EVERYTHING.

 

[IWannaKnow]

OK, so I hope you don't like your salami coated with black pepper:

http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/salami-food-poisoning-lawsuits-filed-7967/

Salami Food Poisoning Lawsuits Filed as FDA Links Salmonella to Pepper

"The FDA indicates that tainted black pepper may be the cause of a recent salmonella outbreak that resulted in a salami recall last month. The agency made the tentative announcement as the first salmonella food poisoning lawsuits over the peppered salami were filed against the manufacturer, Daniele International, Inc.
More than 200 people in 42 states, and the District of Columbia, have fallen ill as the result of a strain of salmonella known as Salmonella Montevideo, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say is likely connected to recalled salami produced by Daniele International."
********************************************************************

 

[January.]

I'm going to print your post and frame it and hang in the kitchen .. making sure that my DH sees it.

I'm really happy to know that someone else washes their watermelons with soapy water. So, that makes at least two of us. LOL.

Once I bought a bag of pre-washed mustard greens .. hah! I opened the bag, and right there on the top layer was a big glob of bird poopy. Pre-washed, indeed!

At a cafeteria I asked for a side of spinach greens. It was passed to me with a ladybug (dead, cooked, in fact) perched right on the top.

Once I bought a hamburger for lunch, and it had quite a lot of lettuce on it, so I opened it up to remove some of the lettuce. When I started taking lettuce off, I found mold ... thick, fuzzy mold ... between the layers.

Pays to watch your food, at home and when eating out.

OMG that whole post makes me want to yack! :rolling: I have certainly learned my lesson from this thread! I always rinse my fruits and vegetables, but don't wash the bagged stuff.

Here's what I wonder though. If there's fecal bacteria and such on our fruits and veggies, does just rinsing it really get rid of it?

 

[Jade]

OMG that whole post makes me want to yack! :rolling: I have certainly learned my lesson from this thread! I always rinse my fruits and vegetables, but don't wash the bagged stuff.

Here's what I wonder though. If there's fecal bacteria and such on our fruits and veggies, does just rinsing it really get rid of it?

Washing doesn’t always remove the contamination:

Some processors expose spinach to chlorine to kill E. coli, which can kill the bacteria on the leaf surface. But if the bacteria are in irrigation water they can enter the plant, and the chlorine will not reach them, Dr. Acheson said.

I heard on TV that using only the freshest fresh cold greens is best as this article backs up:

The cause of the outbreak is still not clear. It could be irrigation water, Dr. Acheson said, or it could be a processing problem in a factory. In the humid environment of a sealed bag of spinach or salad mix, E. coli can multiply rapidly if the bag is allowed to get too warm, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/us/18spinach.html?_r=2

More on when pathogens “have infiltrated fresh produce”:

[will not let me cut and paste so you will have to scan through the article]

http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/FST-19.pdf

Also at that link contamination from improperly composted manure.
Compost is used to grow organically.

There goes my Prewashed Organic Mixed Baby Lettuce Greens. Just the other day I got a crunch of grit from a little red oak leaf lettuce.

For further disillusion I found out that baby carrots that come in the plastic bags and are already peeled and um… washed are reamed out of a big carrot and subject to lots of contamination. I’m just too disheartened to look up that reference. This doesn’t refer the real bunches of young carrots with their greens.

 

[Julessleuther]

I wash everything before I use it--I stopped buying bagged produce a few years ago after the last e-coli (or was it salmonella) recall. I have not heard about baking soda though, I will try that.

 

[January.]

This is why I'm usually scared of leafy greens. I only recently started buying it again because I was too scared of it for years. And here I thought my contamination OCD was getting better, I even stopped taking my medication. Go figure!