191–200 of 242 posts
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?
Carry on as you are? You're more likely to get hit by a bus than catch E. Coli from a salad.
I really wonder what's the problem. Either the factory or the restaurant washes the salad for you or you do it yourself. Here in an European country I can buy pre-washed salad like sliced sugarloaf or lettuce. I toss this directly on my plate and chow away. It's more expensive, but it's convenient and probably safe. I trust the shop to sell me good quality.
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?
A silly comparison, but it does raise the concern that even those that watch what they eat and try to be healthy can't escape the widespread bacterial problems in food in modern industrial food processing.
I really wonder what's the problem. Either the factory or the restaurant washes the salad for you or you do it yourself. Here in an European country I can buy pre-washed salad like sliced sugarloaf or lettuce. I toss this directly on my plate and chow away. It's more expensive, but it's convenient and probably safe. I trust the shop to sell me good quality.
I'm loving this whole debate. People have eaten unwashed food for millennia. Now all of a sudden our food is only safe to eat if it's been sterilised with radiation!?
Okay, so how do I lower my risks? Should I stop buying pre-washed? Should I buy local? I like my salads, how do I get it safely on my plate?
Well then carry on as you are...
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China has a long history of using human waste as fertilizer on fields, so only eating cooked vegetables was good hygiene. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/...
It's more fair that many, many places have done the same thing. When I was in Ghana for a summer in 1987, I was warned that "night soil" was often used in vegetable fields, and I should watch out for my tender American digestive system not being able to deal with the uncooked results. No slight against Ghana in particular, that's typical for countries at Ghana's level of development.
[1] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/09/recycling-animal-and-...
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From a European perspective, I so often notice this in American movies. Everybody constantly with shoes in beds an sofas, apparently without a thought. Always grosses me out - it simply would not ever occur to me to put my shoes on furniture.
Even when I'm completely black out, shitfaced drunk, I still manage to pull my shoes off before falling onto my bed. The one time I couldn't manage to get my boots off, I just sort of awkwardly slept with my legs hanging over the edge of the bed.
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However, washing in a water & bleach sanitizing solution will. You generally don't cook romaine lettuce prior to making a salad.
You wash your vegetables in bleach before eating them?!
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>but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide. my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. something being used for thousands of years merely means it doesn't cause harm in small enough timescales so that people can associate it with the effects. see: smoking, which is dangerously poisono…
>my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts. You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This…
I don't really follow you here. You mean that the guarantee is about safety? I mean back then our life expectancy was lower. The fact that humanity survived with old methods doesn't mean what we did was safe(r) in general. It just means that enough people survived so that humanity didn't die off as a whole. That is a very weak guarantee.
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Even when I'm completely black out, shitfaced drunk, I still manage to pull my shoes off before falling onto my bed. The one time I couldn't manage to get my boots off, I just sort of awkwardly slept with my legs hanging over the edge of the bed.
But you wore them right up to your bed, not taking them off at the door? :O