Dole bagged lettuce recalled because of E-coli related deaths

[Sharon in Colorado]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12536902/

[rawpriestess]

WOW, well, thank God/dess we grow our own, or we get it from local farmers, never buy that bagged stuff, because it usually has sulfites and is way too expensive.


thanks so much for posting this Sharon. This is something that our board members need to be aware of.

[mcasburn]

I am going to the Farmers' Market TODAY.

[Sharon in Colorado]

You are most welcome. My mother actually alerted me to it because she knows we use spinach. I usually buy the big plastic containers of Earthbound Organics spinach for our smoothies and I never wash.

That leaves another question...if there is indeed E. Coli on the lettuce, and it is rinsed, does the E. Coli really wash off? I wonder if they've actually re-inspected the lettuce after washing to see if this type of advice works.

On another note, they did mention that they weren't sure where the E. Coli came from - it could have been a deer running across the field just as much as from a worker.

[rawpriestess]

I would think that rinsing would help, but how much to rinse, how long, EEK!!


I'd rather just buy the whole head of lettuce, if that's the case.

Also, I'm sure Dole is a reputable company, so if THEY have this issue, imagine.

we have deer in our garden all the time, and (so far) we are healthy,

they take one big deer bite out of our lettuce, each head, LOL

they like the tender center I guess, anyway, they do poop alot, all over the place, alot of cherry pits, LOL

but usually not in the garden, usually next to it. so who knows, I'd rather have a little deer poop in my food, then to eat store bought stuff.

[Sharon in Colorado]

I am surpirsed there's anything left with the deer.

I am hesitant to start any kind of garden outside as we constanly have frolicking deer and jumping cottontails all over the place. I started leaving out our carrot pulp for the rabbits, but then a bear came up to our trash and ripped out all the bags so I had to stop doing that, chuckle.

Not that I can grow anything that produces. My tomato plants, grown from little baby seeds, are almost touching the ceiling already, I've re-potted and re-staked them 3 times, they are beautiful but they're still NOT fruiting.

I'm trying to grow basil from seed and they get started but flop over after a while.

My mint is the only one is flourishing well!

[RawFoodieMom]

YIKES! :eek:

We had a problem a few months ago in this area with bean sprouts being contaminated, the grocery stores had to stop selling beans sprouts for a short time, they recalled everything.

Thanks for the info and link, Sharon. There's a couple of things I found interesting on that page....

Like this quote, from one of the lettuce farm owners. He's talking about how they remove the outer leaves and core the lettuce right in the field, before they take it into the plant or whatever to cut further:

"Smith: All the lettuce is funneled through a disinfectant chamber, to basically heal the cut, then it is immediately conveyed into a lined bin container."

What the heck does this disinfectant chamber do?? This is disturbing to me. Are they heating it or treating it with something? How are they disinfecting it? :confused:

I don't buy that bagged iceburg stuff, or romaine. But sometimes I buy bagged spinach, and I buy the tubs of organic baby greens, do they "disinfect" that stuff too? I'd like to know more about this "disinfectant chamber". :(

The other interesting point was this:

"Check the expiration date before you eat it. Even if the lettuce looks good, you should know E.coli can grow quickly in deteriorating greens."

Sometimes I still eat it a day or 2 past the date if it still looks fine. Hmmmm, maybe not anymore! :o :rolleyes:

[juliebove]

Wow! Not again! I used to buy bagged salad all the time until I started having trouble with some of it wilting or looking brown before its pull date. I think perhaps what the stores are doing is leaving it sitting out and unrefrigerated either in the stockroom or on the floor before putting it in the refrigerated case.

My local health food store recently switched companies for their organic produce boxes. I've been getting bags of assorted greens, spinach and other lettuces from them weekly. So I haven't been having to buy as much lettuce. When I do, it's mainly heads of romaine now. I got burned out on the weedy stuff because it wilts so fast and I discovered that my daughter prefers the romaine.

[Dimond]

Aren't they talking about non-organic lettuce?

[berrymarymac]

This is quite frightening, especially since it's supposed to me pre-washed so we don't have to worry about these things! Something must have happened in the factory

[honeybee joy]

Originally Posted By Sharon in Colorado
I am hesitant to start any kind of garden outside as we constanly have frolicking deer and jumping cottontails all over the place. I started leaving out our carrot pulp for the rabbits, but then a bear came up to our trash and ripped out all the bags so I had to stop doing that, chuckle.
Cute story. :)


Thanks for that info. I buy this organic stuff in a box, and I have been getting lazy lately, and not washing, because it says it is ready to eat.

[Coriander74]

I only buy the bagged spinach but perhaps it's time to start washing my own. YIKES! Thanks Sharon for that link...

[lissomllama]

I only buy organic lettuce but it isn't bagged, it sits on a shelf where people can touch it with their bare hands, many of these people I'm sure have just gotten a bunch of meat from the meat section of the store, or maye not washed their hands after being in the bathroom and touching questionable things. I worry about this, but stressing isn't going to help a thing. I wash everything (including my hands and body in pure water and maybe some honey) because I don't believe in using soaps. I try not to stress and I try to just believe that my lettuce will be clean. I don't buy inorganic or bagged salads at all.

As far as gardens go. I have heard that mixing together large amounts of cheyenne pepper powder, onions and garlic in buckets and spreading all around the base of edible plants will keep deer and other animals away without hurting them, yourselfves or the produce. This is supposed to be very effective.

[juliebove]

Onions are great for keeping some critters away that might otherwise eat your veggies. I only have a small yard now so I use Earthboxes for my produce. But when I had a big garden, I planted onions all around the edges of it. Can't remember where I read to do this, though. It was really effective but we wound up with far more onions than we could ever eat.

[Sheryl]

Don't you think it's funny that there are probably HUNDREDS of dealths from tainted meat, but it's the deadly sprouts and lettuce and raspberries that make the news all the time? I find it rather odd given how much recall there is for meat and drugs that newspapers whip themselves up into such a frenzy. I guess it's the oddity of having a 'health' food killing people. Yet it's not the food itself, it's the warped means it's grown and processed!!

My goodness!
Sheryl

[Sharon in Colorado]

"Smith: All the lettuce is funneled through a disinfectant chamber, to basically heal the cut, then it is immediately conveyed into a lined bin container."

What the heck does this disinfectant chamber do?? This is disturbing to me. Are they heating it or treating it with something? How are they disinfecting it? :confused:

I don't buy that bagged iceburg stuff, or romaine. But sometimes I buy bagged spinach, and I buy the tubs of organic baby greens, do they "disinfect" that stuff too? I'd like to know more about this "disinfectant chamber". :(



I was wondering about that chamber myself. It must be the magic chamber that makes all conventional bagged salads taste the way they do. I personally don't buy Dole, because it does have a bad taste to me.

I've never had this problem with Earthbound Farms. I'd recommend e-mailing them - for some reason I think they are extra careful, being an organic company and all.

[Sheryl]

I love the quality of Earthbound farms - delicious too!

Cheers,
Sheryl

[lissomllama]

Good point sheryl, while things can become contaminated, this seems like such scare mongering. This is their sneeky way of getting us to say "oh well, lettuce is contaminated, I need to be eating everything cooked". The health benefits of lettuce, sprouts etc. far outweight the possible dangers of happening to get a contaminated specimen. They conveniently forget that E-coli is often found in ground beef. The news, medical community and advertising agencies are seriously hurting people here.

[Sheryl]

My husband Piers saw today an article on raw.... they warned that 1) that raw and cooked required different levels of stomach acid, and people might not digest properly (this is in the why NOT raw section) and also that 2) fruit and veggies had pesticides etc in them and eating large amounts could be dangerous. Avoiding of course the fact that meat products have MORE in them!!

I think often it's based on what will sell (ie vegetables being bad for you is unique and new) and often people's lack of full information when they write articles.

It's sad... I know people that won't eat sprouts fearing for their health, when in fact that was just another of the media scares. Far more dangerous eating meat!!

Sheryl

[juliebove]

I collect books on food, nutrition, health, etc. I find the history of all this to be very interesting.

Refrigeration as we know it is a fairly recent thing. When I was a kid, the refrigerators had to be defrosted. The freezer compartment in ours was very small. And it didn't freeze solidly, unless you count the ice crystals that formed in it. The temperature in the refrigerator part was not very stable either, sometimes freezing the food or not keeping it quite cold enough. We also didn't know as much about food safety then as we do now.

And although refrigerators were being made as far back as the 1920's, it was more common for people to have an ice box. These might keep a plate of leftovers safe for the night or keep a head of lettuce from wilting, but if the ice ran out, they were no good.

Food was sometimes kept in the cellar, which in those days could be a fairly small hole dug into the plain earth. There might be bugs and worms down there but it was cooler underground so it helped to keep the food fresh. Or the food might be put in something as waterproof as it could be and immersed in a pond, stream or well.

None of these things were ideal though and at some point the food was bound to freeze or spoil. Sometimes people were forced to eat the spoiled food or starve to death. What they learned was that there were two things they could do to help prevent getting sick from the spoiled food. One was to highly season it with peppers or chiles. It was thought that the hot spices not only covered up the taste of the spoiled food but helped to prevent one from getting sick. The other was to cook the food.

I well remember the warnings about home canned green beans and botulism. My grandma would buy green beans in a can and cook them until they were mush, fearing we'd die if we ate them any less cooked.

These days, canning jars and lids have been perfected to where they are pretty foolproof. In the old days the equipment was not so good nor did the home canners use procedures to keep the food safe. But canning was one of the ways they could have food to eat during the winter. One couldn't go to the local market for a head of lettuce or fresh green beans. Fresh produce was very hard to come by unless you were wealthy enough to buy something imported.

This is where the "meat and potatoes" diet came in. Meat was canned or cured or smoked or in some way "put up". Foods such as green beans were dried and one hoped that the root vegetables and apples would keep long enough for the first greens to peek up in the spring. I've read stories about people eating nothing but field greens and wild onions for days when spring arrived because they were so starved for fresh produce.

But now almost everyone has a refrigerator. Some foods are still seasonal, but we can get pretty much anything we want in terms of produce year round. Even if we didn't have a refrigerator, many of us live close enough to a store to where we could get anything we wanted, any time we wanted, provided we had money to do so. Running water is another thing people didn't have in the old days. Now everything we need is at our disposal any time we wanted. Now granted, people in third world countries aren't always so lucky. But for the most part, all those old rules no longer apply.

I would never dream of buying fresh produce from a farm stand or grocery store and eating it without washing. Yet I know plenty of people who do. They've never worked on farms. I have! Even in my own garden, I wouldn't eat something without washing it because bugs could have walked over it or who knows what. Yes, I have popped open pods of peas and eaten them out of the pods. This probably wasn't such a smart thing to do. I should have washed the pods at least. And I know not to cut into something like a melon without washing it first.

These days we are very lucky indeed. We have so many kinds of foods available to us. It's just sad that we can't trust what a package says. When something says "Washed and ready to use", it should be safe. But apparently it isn't.

[RawFoodieMom]

Thanks for sharing Julie, very interesting. It does help to understand that kind of history, especially the canning.

:)

Sharon, I'm not sure what brand it is that I've been buying for the tubs of organic greens. Sometimes I get them from Costco, sometimes I get them from the supermarket which is a different brand. I think the ones I get from Costco might be Earthbound Farms. I'm hoping to get there tomorrow as I'm out of baby greens. I'll try and contact them about their processes from farm to package. I'll be sure to share anything I find out.

[Pailani]

this seems like such scare mongering. This is their sneeky way of getting us to say "oh well, lettuce is contaminated, I need to be eating everything cooked". The health benefits of lettuce, sprouts etc. far outweight the possible dangers of happening to get a contaminated specimen.

Maybe this is a way of scaring the public into accepting irradiated produce.

A couple months ago, someone on a message board I visit found a shotgun shell in their Earthbound Farms Organic salad. She contacted the company and learned that the company uses automatic shotgun machines to periodically fire blanks to scare birds away - the noise alone scares them off. They do that instead of using pesticides. This was the first time in years that a pellet had made it past their triple washing process.

I can't imagine what kind of damage that would do to my Vitamix if I tossed a handful of lettuce into a green smoothie.