Our first salad bowl of the year – a mixture of fristina, aruba and lollo rossa. Unlike the salad bags I often pick up from the supermarket, these leaves actually have taste. They haven’t been sprayed with anything and were on our plates within an hour from being cut so tasted really fresh. As these are all cut-and-come-again leaves I’m looking forward to more salads over the next few weeks.
Growing lettuce has made me give some real thought to the contents and cost of bagged salads. There have been a number of articles about this in recent years. Last year The Observer investigated the treatment and air miles of an average shopping bag. It discussed how ‘the insecticides acephate and cypermethrin, and the fungicides dicloran and iprodione are routinely used on salad crops’ which are also washed in chlorinated water before being packed and transported. There’s another good article about the contents of bagged salad by Felicity Lawrence on the Ecologist website. Amongst other things she discusses the lower nutritional value of salad leaves that have been picked a number of days before reaching the consumer but which appear ‘fresh’ due to refrigeration and gasses pumped into the plastic ‘pillows’ we buy.
Food for thought indeed…
