Story in today's Chi Tribune about new report showing that bagged "leafy greens" are a rising threat for food-borne diseases. Not really surprising given the spinach outbreak two years ago. And didn't most of us think that pre-washed, bagged and "ready-to-eat" greens were just too good to be true when they first started showing up in stores some years ago? The article, citing the report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is worth reading, even if just as a reminder.
So what is the core problem? In my opinion, it's simply industrial agriculture. Mammoth farms in California, with absentee owners, aggregating produce from many dispersed fields, processed and packaged by complex machinery, then shipped thousands of miles away to the produce dept. of your big mega supermarket. Who knows where the "leafy greens" actually came from, whether they were vulnerable to livestock runoff or other contamination somewhere along their long odyssey to your fridge.
Solution? Buy your greens as much as possible from small farmers who grow it themselves. Is there still risk of runoff contamination? Of course, in any agricultural area, there is that danger, but if the grower is managing a relatively small field, and knows exactly where all the crops are grown and picked, then the chances of unknown contamination are far lower.
Here in the Great Lakes region, it's getting cold, but spinach can be grown well into late autumn.
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