I’m Lookin’ At You, Trader Joe’s

This study in Consumer Report Magazine tested a bunch of bagged salad greens for bacteria and yucky stuff. They found 39% of the bags had coliforms, a type of bacteria found in human and animal fecal matter, and also in soil, submerged wood and “in other places outside the human body”, says the EPA. They also found 23% of the bags contained enterococcus, a more specific bacteria to human feces.

The study found higher instances of bacteria in bags that were 1-5 days before their expiration date. They theorize that the longer the greens are closed up in the bag, the more time the bacteria has to grow and spread to measurable levels. Although the greens haven’t gone bad, they’re also not in a sterile environment and therefore, bacteria trapped inside during the sealing process is growing every day.

They didn’t test fresh lettuce or lettuce that has been in a vegetable bag in your fridge for 3 days, or any other circumstance in which lettuce is contained before we eat it. I think we can all safely and happily jump to the conclusion that bagged lettuce is dirtier or not as good as other types of lettuce containment, such as picking up fresh lettuce and putting it in a bag in the fridge, but the study is not saying that nor could prove that. Your fresh fridge lettuce could have human feces in it too.

The reason the Consumer Report people chose bagged salad mix for the study is because the packaging claims the greens are “washed 3 times” or “prewashed”, implying that the eater doesn’t need to further wash the greens. And they found that, no matter how many times the bag claims to have washed the greens, it’s still a very extremely smart idea to wash the greens again. You could even say that the labels are misleading.

Even items that aren’t claiming to be more clean than necessary even before you bring them home can have the same problems. For instance, if you shrink wrap a bouquet of broccoli, you’re creating the same conditions for growing bacteria as a bagged salad mix. The broccoli may appear to be safer and cleaner, because it’s been protected from dirty containers and handlers before reaching you. But really, that broccoli was handled by a bunch of dirty containers and handlers before being shrink wrapped and delivered to the store. In addition, the plastic barrier between you and the produce makes it much more difficult to see if the item is fresh.

Packaged and pre-processed food may or may not be healthier and cleaner than fresh food. Wasn’t there a study that found kitchens to have more fecal matter in them than bathrooms? Food’s not that clean, and the fecal matter mentioned in the bagged lettuce study won’t kill you. The problem is that packaged and processed food suppliers make claims, both outright and implied, that their food is cleaner. And it’s not.

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