At pretty well every conference or meeting I went to in 2008 and 2009 I was given a reusable grocery bag. A decent registration gift to hold programs, promotional materials and goodies – that served some post-meeting utility as well. Not a bad replacement for the laptop bags that were ubiquitous in the five years before. Lately meeting organizers have been giving out aluminum water bottles, another usable item. We’ve collected 6 or 7 reusable grocery bags and they are now in rotation for our weekly shops. .jpg)
A couple of weeks ago a press release about a study looking at the handling and microbiological content of a select group of bags was released. What I wrote then was:
The study, when and if it is published will provide some nice baseline results on what people say they do, demonstrates the effect of washing, and doesn’t like some try to point out really say that plastic bags are any safer (there was no comparison) but there are a couple of things missing that could really have been useful. Two big questions still need to be answered:
– Generic E. coli is floating around in bags, recoverable in the Gerba study in 12 % of those tested, but can it be (or is it likely) to be transferred to any ready-to-eat foods, or somehow to food contact surfaces in the home?
– What effect does drying have on the bags, if at any? According to Gerba et al., washing works, no one reports doing it; but what about flipping them inside out and drying bags for a few days after use?
After that post, a local TV station called about the study and conclusions and wanted to know a bit more about potential risks what people could do in their homes to reduce the chance of foodborne illness. My tips were what we do in our house: Wrap raw meats in a secondary plastic bag to create a barrier and catch any dripping juices; washing our bags every couple of weeks to remove anything that might be floating around and dedicating a reusauable bag as the “meat bag” and washing it more often, usually after every shop.