Salad is the food that most people in this generation choose to eat. Eating healthy and living a healthier lifestyle is number one on the list of almost every person in the world. Many think eating fresh and green vegetables and fruits from salad bars or markets would do the trick, however, how can we make sure that these greens are clean?
An article in Food Safety said that one TV station in South Carolina asked 15 different salad bar items to be tested for any pathogen contamination. The lab results showed that there were no E. Coli or Salmonella were present, but they were able to find a high number of microbes and total coliform bacterias were present.
The TV station, WMBF in Myrtle Beach sent a cooler packed with 4 types of samples collected from different open salad bars and local grocery stores to IEH Laboratories near Seattle for an overnight delivery. The cooler included leafy greens, raw vegetables, cooked meats and mayonnaise-based salads.
The station reported that the lab tested the number of microbes in one gram of food, besides the three major pathogens above, they were able to find that the leafy green samples all had more than a million colony-forming units per gram of microbes.
