“Eco-friendly” shopping has a drawback. The people involved tend to be filthy and they don’t keep their reusable shopping bags sanitary, which means they are spreading bacteria and disease with their tree hugging madness:
Tests on shoppers’ bags revealed half contained traces of E.coli, a lethal toxin which killed 26 people in Scotland in 1996 in one of the worlds worst food poisoning outbreaks.
Scientists also found many were contaminated with salmonella.
Researchers blame the fact that consumers do not realise reusable bags need to be washed regularly at high temperatures to kill off bugs deposited by raw meat packaging.
They warned the levels of bacteria they found were high enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even death.
Children may be in the greatest danger, they added, as they are particularly vulnerable to the effects of organisms such as E.coli.
The tests were carried out by experts at the University of Arizona, who stopped a total of 84 shoppers in Tucson, Los Angeles and San Francisco to check the state of their bags.
I doubt meat is the culprit since so many eco-shoppers are vegetarians and vegans. All foods can be contaminated with bacteria and I’m betting people who eat only organic tofu assume there is no reason to clean their bags. I have a hard time envisioning someone reusing a fabric bag chicken has leaked into sans washing it.
But then again I’m not a dirty hippy. The article goes on to claim that 97% of people who use eco-friendly bags never wash or bleach them.
So if you shop where there’s a lot of these reusable baggers take extra time to sanitize your purchases and yourself. Better yet shop at a regular store where normal people who are reasonably clean shop.
I use reuseable shopping bags, and I’m a hard-core conservative.
I’m also a “tree hugger” cuz I happen to like oxygen, and hate using petroleum products that likely derived from some Middle Eastern sewer of a country. Namely plastic bags. We see plastic bags all the time, hung up on trees and bushes, caught in the ditch, floating in Lake Michigan. Not to mention, floating in an island miles wide in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Algae from the oceans produces more oxygen than trees. I daresay plastic bags in the water is just as nasty as e-coli in the reusable bags.
There’s no excuse for being a scuzz ball. Wash the bags once in a while. Plastic bags are for lazy people who are prolly on Food Stamps.
Okay Rob, you know I appreciate you,right?
I use reusable shopping bags. Always. And I wash them after each use. I am also a normal person who is more than reasonably clean.
I agree with A.C. – there is no excuse for being disgusting or lazy. Wash the damned bags!
You’re one of the few though Patty. I’ve been at Whole Foods and seen people put dripping clams and oysters on top of vegetables in a bag that was stained with old stuff.
Plastic bags are actually quite useful. I reuse my (that don’t have meat) for various things. Like garbage bags, lining backpacks, etc.
The anti-plastic folks have their hearts in the right place, but too often they have no common sense. Take water bottle bans. I have inlaws who won’t buy plastic water bottles. But what happens if the grid goes down? Water only runs to your house if you have electricity and most people don’t live by clean safe sources of water. They will die if that solar storm that NASA talks about comes because of the pretension that they’re “going green”
I’m not on food stamps by the way.