Why Your Packaged Salad May Be Disgustingly Filthy

by Tara Lohan · 2010-02-03 11:30:00 UTC
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saladI think Treehugger summed it up pretty well with the headline: Is There Sh!t in Your Salad?

And the answer is: 39 percent of pre-packaged salad greens have high levels of fecal matter. (I'm thinking that any level is too high, but according to some experts "the unacceptable level of total coliforms or Enterococcus is 10,000 or more colony forming units per gram (CFU/g)," according to a new study by Consumer Reports.) I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I think ewww is nevertheless the appropriate response.

Consumer Reports tested 208 bags of greens from 16 different brands sold in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. They tested for what's know as "indicator organisms" including coliforms and Enterococcus, which flag poor sanitation and fecal contamination.

And keep in mind, many of these salads are the kind that already say "prewashed" on them. So, if you think those are cleaner, you might want to reconsider. Same for organic -- apparently it didn't make a difference.

If you're having flashbacks to the great E. coli spinach outbreak of 2006, this isn't it. According to Consumer Reports, you'd need a larger sample size to find the really dangerous stuff like E. coli and salmonella. They report that the Department of Agriculture finds salmonella in 2 out of every 4,000 packages tested.

But even bacteria can be bad. As Naomi Starkman writes for Civil Eats, while there are no standards of how much bacteria can be in salad greens, there are unacceptable limits for milk, beef and drinking water.

Maybe someday salad eaters will have the same rights to clean, safe food.

Photo credit: Goodrob13 via flickr

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet.org where she heads up the environment, water, and food sections. Her work has appeared on the websites of The Nation, Mother Jones, the Huffington Post and in Yes! Magazine.
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