Why you shouldn’t buy bagged salads

You’ve heard me say it over and over again, and I’m going to say it again now. If your nana wouldn’t have eaten it why would you? Salad never came in bags in the old days, it was fresh and bought off the shelf just the way it came out of the ground. But in the past few years bagged salad has appeared in supermarkets and with it a huge risk to our safety. A few years ago bagged salads were recalled because they contained listeria and I sent out a warning then not to eat them. And this week we found out that more bagged salads are spreading a nasty stomach bug which effected 127 people and hospitalised 38 of them. And the worst thing about this saga is that the name of the product was kept secret by several government departments.
So here’s my other saying that I’ve said over and over again – never trust the government or supermarkets to protect the health of your family. We place too much trust in these two organisations and too often we are let down by them both. A food safety issue as huge as this should have been revealed a lot sooner and consumers should have been alerted, instead we weren’t.
So, from now on please just buy salad which is either sitting fresh on the shelf, or is in a hard plastic container where there is air. The reason bagged salads are such a risk is that the environment of the bag is a perfect breeding ground for any germs that may contaminate the salad during production. Often the bags will be filled with chlorine gas to minimise this risk, and quite frankly I don’t think chlorine belongs anywhere near salad.
And always wash it. Any salad I have in the fridge goes into a bowl of water half an hour before dinner to soak. This not only cleans it but freshens it up a little. Then I spin it in a salad spinner.
And if you can, grow your own. I recently bought two bags of soil mix – one vege and the other tomato – and planted them up. You just poke holes in the bottom of the bag for drainage, cut a hole in the top and throw the plants in – see the pic at right.
It’s an easy way to have a garden at our townhouse where there’s not much land. And at the end of summer I’ll just spread the soil over some trees!