You want to do the right thing and start eating more salads. So, you go to the market and buy a bag of triple washed, prepackaged greens. These are so convenient to use – all you have to do is rip open the bag and dump it into your salad bowl. But, you’ve got to ask yourself, “Is your salad going to kill you?”
The latest food-borne illness outbreak related to packaged greens began last summer. The Centers of Disease Control reports that 18 people have now been hospitalized and one person has died because t
heir salad was contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. The products linked to this most recent outbreak were produced in Springfield, Ohio, and have since been recalled.
The packages say that the contents have been triple washed; How could this happen? “Listeria is a natural soil inhabitant, and spinach commonly comes in contact with the soil,” says Jeri Barak, associate professor of plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Listeria, like Salmonella and E. coli, can’t be rinsed or washed from the leaves even if the dirt is.”
One of the reasons why repackaged greens are a greater risk for contamination is because most of them contain younger leaves or micro greens. “Data suggests that bacteria can enter wounds, such as a harvesting cut, and travel some distance into a leaf. But fresh produce that’s harvested as a head has longer leaves and is more mature,” she says. “A consumer has the opportunity to remove part of the head away from the harvest cut and eat leaves in which a pathogen did not reside in the harvest wound.”
Food for thought; It may be the time for all of us to start buying mature, unpackaged produce and rinsing the leaves thoroughly, ourselves.
