Observations of Consumer Salad Preparation

Video footage of 199 volunteers in Northern California as they prepared salad was analyzed for adherence to safe handling recommendations as recommended by the FightBAC! Food Safety Educational Campaign.Almost half of the participants washed lettuce under running water with hand rubbing as recommended, with 15% not washing lettuce at all. Higher percentages of volunteers used hand rubbing and running water on tomatoes (67%) and celery (74%). The majority of volunteers shook the water off of their lettuce (58%), tomatoes (75%) and celery (81%) to dry them. Only 27% of volunteers removed stem scars from tomatoes even though studies have shown that higher numbers of bacteria may be found in tomato stem scars compared to the other parts of tomatoes. Video analysis has shown that consumer preparation of produce used in salad may not be adequate.