I just hate cutting lettuce. Oh, and buying it and then finding out the middle is rotten.

But I guess I would hate e coli more, right?

I love bagged salad! I always weigh the convenience vs the risk when I'm getting it in the supermarket, and convenience always wins. They're so easy and some of them are extremely tasty as well. I haven't gotten sick yet, so knock on wood.

I'm all about just buying a head of lettuce then washing it and spinning it in a salad spinner. I don't exactly see how that's safer than buying bagged lettuce though.

I had heard of the e.coli outbreak in September, but I had not heard that bagged salad is always unsafe. I generally buy whole lettuce fo rhome use but I keep stuff for lunches at work, and that's where the bagged stuff comes in handy for me.

Oh well. Apparently the whole food world is out to get me in one way or another, so what's one more thing?

this makes me feel a tiny bit better about the fact that i hardly ever eat salad...though then again, e. coli manages to get into peanut butter too

a little bit of poo is good for your diet.

Bagged lettuce, cut in some dirty factory and shipped halfway across the country - what's the appeal? Saving the .30 min to cut a head of lettuce?

The only "bagged lettuce" I buy is direct from the local farmer, whole-head and taken from the ground less than 24 hrs ago

What do you expect when you teach whole generations to depend on the government to think for them? I was talking about this to a co-worker, and she announced, "If it was really dangerous, they would have made it illegal to sell it."

Phooey on it and the horse it rode in on. I just joined a local farm co-op, and greens are in season.

@ancientsociety:
If you're going for 100% iceberg, there's no point, but I think most bagged iceberg salads have bits of carrots and red cabbage... things with actual flavor.
if my local grocer here in the midwest had a big vat of mesclun I'd dig into that, but otherwise it's gotta be bags.

@ancientsociety: Does the head of lettuce you get from the farmer come pre-mixed with four different varieties of lettuce? Didn't think so.

@burgundyyears: I think it takes about 1 min to mix a few different lettuces together, not to mention that I can mix them in when I mix all the other veggies in.

Again, what was the point of bagged salads? Oh, right - "convenience". How much extra did that cost? I suppose your side of e.coli is like an extra perk though.

@fordpickup: Salad Spinners take up a lot of freaking space in my high efficiency dishwasher. sigh.

Try buying this brand! If the frog doesn't die, then there's no e. coli!

[neatorama.cachefly.net]

Kidding aside, how hard is it to chop or grate a few vegetables yourself? No, it does not take a great amount of time.

If you don't like chopping tomatoes, buy cherry tomatoes; chopping a head of romaine takes seconds; peeling and cutting cucumber, carrots or others just a few minutes. It takes longer to boil a can of soup than to make a basic salad.

I'm sure that there's a correlation. Perhaps bagged & branded salads only come from mega mechananized farms that drop manure from helicopters or something. But there doesn't seem to be any inherent reason that the bagged salads are higher risk.