Those Reusable Grocery Bags Can Cause Food Poisoning
Get out your bleach and launder those reusable fabric grocery bags after each use. You’re not clogging up landfill with plastic throw-aways, but your environmental conscientiousness could make you sick.
A microbiological study — a first in North America — of the popular, eco-friendly bags has uncovered some unsettling facts. Swab-testing by two independent laboratories found unacceptably high levels of bacterial, yeast, mold and coliform counts in the reusable bags.
“The main risk is food poisoning,” Dr. Richard Summerbell, research director at Toronto-based Sporometrics and former chief of medical mycology for the Ontario Ministry of Health, stated in a news release. Dr. Summerbell evaluated the study results.
YID With LID: Those Reusable Grocery Bags Can Cause Food Poisoning.
As my dad said, this is one of the reasons why we started using disposable bags: it was cleaner and saved lives.
So, who and where used for how long the tested shopping bags? What materials are the tested bags made of? Where had they been stored between shopping trips? And most of all … had they been used for other purposes as well?
In many western countries it is customary to use reusable bags, baskets and the likes, especially since plastic bags are charged for and are rather expensive. Having lived in said countries, I have never heard or seen any case were people got sick from their shopping bags! With the exception of fresh, loose produce and the occasional bakery product (they usually are in bags too), the goods we purchase are mostly tightly packaged.
A little common sense goes a long way.
I prefer the biodegradable plastic bags to reusable bags, myself.