Those Reusable Grocery Bags Can Cause Food Poisoning

Once again the cure is as bad as the illness. Remember when you went to the grocery store and brought your food home in brown paper bags. Those bags were great, they had so many uses once you brought them home, everything from trick or treating, to trash bags. Throughout my school years every text book I had was covered with one of those brown paper bags. But those bags used paper and the environmentalists wanted to save the rain forests so they switched to those thin plastic bags. The plastic could still be used for Halloween, and are perfect for your wet bathing suits when coming home from the beach. But plastic uses petroleum, takes centuries to decompose, and to be honest, they aren't really strong enough to hold the groceries without tearing, so they had to come with something new. Enter the reusable grocery bags, they are only good for groceries, but it kill trees and will slow the build-up of plastic in the land fills. The only problem is they can make you sick:

Shoot me - I live in a university town, take my own bags to the store (they’re thinking about taxing or putting a fee on the plastic bags), and am vegan.

I read the article and some things don’t make sense:
1. There appears to be contaminants in moist cloth bags, ok, but why are they moist? Veggies that might be wet from the sprayer are put in little plastic bags anyway (are they going to do away with those?), so there’s nothing wet in the bags.

2. The bags have fecal matter - wtf? The article mentioned diapers - who the heck is putting dirty diapers in a bag they use for food?

3. Wrap meat so there is no contamination. No problem for me, don’t eat meat. Even when I did, of course you wrap meat; it can leak.

I wonder if the dire warnings are in response to uses that aren’t that prevalent for people who use their bags just for grocery shopping?

Just to keep my FReep cred, I use and reuse plastic bags. I don’t want to make others use cloth bags. I don’t pay for my bags, but have a collection of freebies from conferences and events around town where they gave away bags. I used the tax on plastic debate in one of my classes and had to ‘help’ students understand the concept that freedom extends to which freakin’ bag you use for shopping. I hate the idea that libs decided a few years ago we were all supposed to use paper, and then it was plastic, and now we’re supposed to tote our own damn cloth bags to the store.

I keep the cloth bags in the car and admit to liking that there is no longer a mountain of plastic bags in the pantry waiting to be used or taken to the store for recycling, which I always forgot to do. I hope that using cloth bags doesn’t mean I have to turn in my official glow-in-the-dark FR ID card.

Hmm..I think they decompose fairly quickly — especially in sunlight.

It varies. Here we have just submitted to a no plastic bag regime.

OK I forget right. So I look behind the car seats. Find two bags some months old - no structural integrity left.

And one bag intact and sound, labeled "Biodegradable, will break down in landfill and sunlight". Thing is: producing and labelling that type of bag was a big enviro-friendly marketing campaign about 5+ years ago. Makes you think.

The fact that a cloth bag will eventually cross contaminate its contents is a no-brainer, isn’t it? This is one of the reasons I don’t use them, in addition to the fact that laundering them will only end up using more energy than the plastic ones (although now that I think about it, drying them in the sun would kill bacteria and in the California sun would take about 3 minutes, as opposed to two hours in the dryer)

Stop and Shop in the Northeast. Not all of them are set up for it; the one right in my town isn't. So I go to one of the two stores in a neighboring town. I go in, swipe my 'Frequent Shopper' card at the machine, and one of the little hand held computers lights up. I take it through the store, scanning the bar codes of items I want to buy, and then put them in my bag. I bought an special insulated bag for frozen and refrigerated stuff, and it works like a charm. For fruits and veggies, I weigh them, then print out the bar code sticker that I then scan in. I just love it, because when I'm done shopping, I'm done! There are only a couple of items that can't be scanned in, but the checkout procedure gives you the chance to type in a PLU code, for coffee, for example. I even get 5 cents for each reusable bag I use! When I'm finished with the checkout, I just roll on our the door with my bags already loaded.

Some folks might not like it, but that's OK. It works great for me! The regular bags were 99 cents each, and the insulated one was $1.99. I think I've already recouped my original purchase of them, since I've gotten money back each time I've used them for the last 6 months or so.

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