31–40 of 242 posts
This confirms what I had always been suspicious of. Those prepackaged veggies sitting in plastic bags are just a few degrees of temperature away from being perfect bacterial breeding grounds. Don't ever buy that crap.
> Leafy vegetables were also the second most common cause of food poisoning-related hospitalizations. I never quite got to like lettuce. I don't know why people like it. It just doesn't have much taste, its leaves are too big, so have to shove them in awkwardly. I'd rather have a salad with chopped ripe tomatoes, onions / chives, cucumbers, cabbage, etc. Even with those, I often wonder if people don't eat more veggie…
> 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.”
So it's not just the lettuce heads that get contaminated, it's how they are processed. This is reminiscent of the issues with large meat packing plants.
I've often wondered what effect that processing has on lettuce. Personally I prefer to buy a head and clean it myself because it tends to last a lot longer than a bag that's usually full of consendate and mashed onto the shelves by store employees, bruising half the contents...
So what can the salad eater do to be safe? Some pathogens can't be washed off. Others can if you scrub, but not if you rinse. If you buy the whole head, pathogens can hide in the core. And if you buy pre-cut bagged salad, how can you wash that? What if you drench the salad in vinegar before eating it, will that kill E. coli O157:H7?
Not sure what you mean? Why can't you wash it?
> Leafy vegetables were also the second most common cause of food poisoning-related hospitalizations. I never quite got to like lettuce. I don't know why people like it. It just doesn't have much taste, its leaves are too big, so have to shove them in awkwardly. I'd rather have a salad with chopped ripe tomatoes, onions / chives, cucumbers, cabbage, etc. Even with those, I often wonder if people don't eat more veggie…
So, track each lettuce head on the blockchain? (I'm joking guys)
Not mentioned is that organic farming doesn't allow irradiation which would kill e-coli. Everybody looks for organic foods thinking they are better but the truth is organic doesn't mean either.
In what way would irradiation make a food not-organic? I believe you, it seems stupid enough to be true.
>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 confirms what I had always been suspicious of. Those prepackaged veggies sitting in plastic bags are just a few degrees of temperature away from being perfect b…
Just because it's already chopped and in a bag doesn't mean it suddenly doesn't need rinsing.
If I recall, not rinsing pre-chopped lettuce was one of the things pointed out to Chipotle after their recent debacle, that may have helped avoid making customers sick.
> Marler also blames Americans’ love of convenience for the problem. “Mass-produced chopped, bagged lettuce that gets shipped around the US amplifies the risk of poisoning,” he 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…
I buy the whole mushrooms for that reason and simply because they're cheaper.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way would irradiation make a food not-organic? I believe you, it seems stupid enough to be true.
USDA rules aside, how would you define "organic". It's a rather ... synthetic concept to begin with.
It's why petro-chemical fertilizers, or the crops grown with them are in-organic, but passing corn grown with petro-chemical fertilizers through the digestive system of a cow magically makes said fertilizer organic.