You go to the grocery store. You pause at the delicious display of fresh vegetables and fruits. You squeeze the tomatoes, finger the Cukes, fondle the apples, thump the melons, maul the cabbage, examine the celery, sniff the pears and then, make your selections.
You go home and … then what?
How many of you dump the stuff in the fridge without washing it? How many of you buy WRAPPED fruits and veggies and don’t clean them after opening the package?
Notice how SHINY the Cukes are and the tomatoes? Notice that OILY feel? See the same with the mounds of apples? Love those cheaper, imported vegetables wrapped in their neat little packets?
SAFETY TIP here!
WASH EVERYTHING before consuming it!
Most grocery stores lightly oil the hard skinned fruits and vegetables to make them look better and to entice you to buy more. After all, shiny, darker skinned items look better than dull, dusty appearing produce. Unfortunately, the oil, which is a cheap vegetable oil, causes all forms of dirt and stuff to stick nicely to the produce.
People finger the produce. Humans just HAVE to handle what they’re going to buy to judge the weight, freshness, texture and potential taste. Those hands which handle the stuff have not been washed in quite some time. What is one the hands goes on the produce!
Ever watch people in grocery stores? They pick their noses, scratch their crotches, scratch their asses, their hair, their armpits, their feet and pick things up from the floor. Many use the bathroom and don’t wash afterwards!
Mothers with babies (shudder) change their little darlings in the car and don’t wash their hands after handling the kid poop! Little kids are great for showing up all sniffly, drooling, snotty, coughing and placing their hands in their mouths, wiping their noses with their fingers and then grabbing that OILED CUKE you’re going to later buy to take home and devour!
Those sealed packets of vegetables are little better, because the guys or gals who wrapped them in those neat little trays do so rather boredly on an assembly line or in-between other duties and their hands have handled packing cases, picked things up off of the floor, rinsed the dirt off of some forms of produce, and grabbed freight dollies.
When you don’t at least rinse off these things – you eat what is on them – like boggers, baby piss, fecal material, and about a million germs. (The MOMS who leave those darn disposable – and full – baby diapers in the parking lot for me to step on DON’T care that much about wiping their hands off!)
It takes a mild detergent solution to get the oil off of oiled vegetables! It’s well worth the trouble because the coating makes those baby diaper and kid germs STICK to the produce so that simple rinsing will not remove them.
Imported produce needs to be always washed because the poorer or more backward the country, the more lax their hygienic laws are. (China happily sent us tons of tomatoes once, which had been fertilized with human shit! We caught most of them, but some got through. Over there, farmers often supplement their expensive fertilizer with human waste!)
Just remember the next time you take an unwashed, delicious looking, hand selected, shiny, oiled apple out of your fridge and bite into it that you might be readily consuming teeny, tiny bits of someone’s fecal material caught in that thin oil coating!
) The reason had to do with the fruit or vegitable’s longevity. The wax or oil on the fruits and vegitables actually helps prevent water loss through the skin of the fruit or vegitable. Don’t know how true that is, but it makes sense to me.