One thought on “See? I told you salad was bad for you.

  1. It’s the air in the bag. The veggies all go through a chlorine solution bath–something stronger than tap water yet a tad weaker than pool water–before they go into the bag. When the bag is sealed, it should be vacuum packed, but the public doesn’t have the patience to “fluff” their salad before they eat it, so the salads are shipped pre-tossed (for lack of a better word) with plenty of air in the package to make it look more, well, salad-like. Back in the 80s, Dad helped come up with this process in a spare warehouse on the Southside of Chicago that was owned by a meat distributor buddy of his. McD shipped all of their salad components vacuum packed, and some geek in the back room put the salad parts together in a more McAppealing fashion.

    None of the food we eat is 100% bacteria free, even if we wash it, but the chlorine bath takes the level of bacteria down at least to government approved. If you dry those leaves before packaging, that also introduces those airborn nasties, which then go into a sealed bag and have all the time in the world in a cozy anaerobic environment. (Yes, vacuum packing is also anaerobic, but they’ve gone directly from chlorinated water to the bag, minimizing the bacteria as opposed to exposing it to more post-bath.) What? Your solution is to put it in a ventilated plastic shell? Now you’re exposing those veggies to any and every nasty that happens to be floating around from the packaging plant to the warehouse to the truck to the grocer’s back room to the shelf where my Aunt Millie can look at it, and open it, and breathe on it, and maybe even take a sample bite out of one of the leaves before putting it back….

    Makes one want to boil everything when you think too much on it.