The reusable grocery bag is a way to avoid paper or plastic when packing your food wares. It’s an easy way to save on the needless use of disposable grocery bags. But does this come at an unexpected cost or create an unanticipated consequence? Could this be having an impact on foodborne illness?
Recently, I was reading an article about a study involving the contents of these empty reusable shopping bags. The contents of an empty bag, you might ask? You bet.
The study found that 64% of the reusable bags tested were contaminated with some level of bacteria and close to 30% had elevated bacterial counts higher than what’s considered safe for drinking water. Further, 40% of the bags had yeast or mold, and some of the bags had an unacceptable presence of coliforms, fecal intestinal bacteria such as E. coli, when there should have been zero bacteria.
It seems that people aren’t washing the bag insides on a regular basis. Use after use of these bags without disinfection is proving to be a potential danger. A chicken package can leave a trace of Salmonella and Campylobacter. Fresh fish could be leaving samples of Listeria and Norovirus and that hamburger package could be leaving behind the dreaded E. coli O157:H7 bacterium. E. coli O157:H7 is a pathogen sometimes associated with ground beef. The bacterium is responsible for very intense food poisoning and when complications from that food poisoning arise, we see terrible diseases like hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a blood disease that typically attacks the young and elderly and which sometimes leads to an even more tragic complication, death.
As little as 10 E. coli O157:H7 bacteria could be enough to cause sickness; just the smallest traces of this bacterium can cause serious problems. Problems no family should have to face. The threat of foodborne illness needs to be weighed against the environmental impact. One question to consider is… does it make more sense to use the disposable plastic bag provided by your grocer?
Maybe the solution doesn’t have to involve abandoning the reusable kitchen bag. Keeping the bags specifically for fresh produce and dry goods separate from bags for meats might help. Disinfecting the bags after every use might also help. Shopping shouldn’t have to be a choice between doing what’s best for the earth and doing what’s best for your family. Exploring options as suggested above may make these choices not necessarily mutually exclusive.
