I did a search for this and nothing came up. If it’s been asked, I apologize.
Anyway, every restaurant in my area has stopped putting sprouts, that hay-like grassy stuff, on their salads. It’s not on the premade salads, or in the salad bar.
What’s the deal? I loved those things! Are they just out of fashion? Are they illegal? Were they not popular enough?
You need to go this site. All sprout related knowledge at your fingertips.
Oh, those are like so 80s.
Seriously, I used to be a big sprout fan – used to sprout my own – but I never eat them any more.
Dr. Andrew Weil, perhaps the major natural-health guru nowadays, is not very impressed with sprouts or for that matter the whole raw-food movement that sprouts belong to. I don’t remember his specific criticism, but he thinks lightly cooked vegetables are preferable to nothing but raw all the time. Which is not to say you shouldn’t serve crudités at your party. I tend to go with Dr. Weil because he verifies his ideas with the latest in medical science, rather than following some health-food dogma.
Speaking both as a homemaker and as a former food service worker, I know that nothing gets slimier faster than sprouts. They are tremendously difficult to store properly and they spoil fast.
So I’m not surprised that the food service industry may have given up on them, especially at the level of “minimum wage employee told to stock the salad bar who grabs the baggie of sprouts from the cooler and dumps it on the salad bar without checking for spoilage, resulting in angry confrontation later in the day between manager and customer threatening to sue”.
wasn’t there a recent (within 1yr) deal about sprouts contaminated with pathogenic bacteria?
Yes, there was a story about E.coli problems in sprouts. Also, technically speaking, sprouts are pretty lame nutritionally. They’re usually grown in plain water, so the sprout contains only the nutrients the original seed contained before sprouting.
A startling exception is broccoli sprouts. The supposedly cancer-fighting chemical found in adult broccoli is much more concentrated in the sprout, which has a much milder taste the than the full-grown stuff.
http://hopkins.med.jhu.edu/NewsMedia/press/1997/SEPT/970903.HTM
Out here on the west coast, one of the major soup and salad places called ‘Souplantation’ stopped offering sprouts about a year ago, but at that time, they put up a sign saying something to the affect of ‘Due to recent health concerns we have stopped offering sprouts’ without much further explanation. I’m surprised they never brought them back, however, because I can’t imagine it was a long-term problem. Meanwhile, all the independent delis around here still offer them…I always get them…and I have never gotten sick. I won’t theorize on what the deal was with the sprouts but I assume it was one of a long series of “Oh my God, a contaminated batch of sprouts showed up at our Tustin store! Better suspend sprouts for the next decade from the salad bar” kind of freak-outs. Seems that every fast food place goes through this every few years with their beef and e.coli.
Though I would like to go on record as saying the worst food poisoning I EVER got was from a Santa Fe chicken sandwich at Carls Jr. Picture a lunch rush, and undercooked chicken. Now picture a guy like me who never complains and never sends food back eating it anyway. Now picture me barfing my guts out for the next three days…
Sprouts lost a lot of their popularity in the last couple of years because people were getting salmonella from them. Apparently, the conditions that the seeds are sprouted under are just perfect for bacterial growth, and if the seeds were just a little contaminated (say, by a farm worker’s dirty hands), they could be pretty bad by the time they were finished sprouting. At some point in the last couple of years the government (I don’t remember if it was the U.S. government or the state of California) decided to require that sprouts have some kind of label warning people to wash them or whatever, and a newspaper story I read predicted that they were going to go out of style because of that.
I have tried broccosprouts. Maybe it was just the batch I had, but they tasted much stronger than adult broccoli or alfalfa sprouts.
Yep, since sprouts are grown and served fresh, they are ripe for contamination with e. coli. There was a substantial outbreak of e.coli in Japan recently, hundreds of people were ill and several died. It was traced back to a popular kind of radish sprout.
If you’d still like sprouts, visit any dining hall at the University of Missouri. Based on experience, you’re less likely to get sick from them than from the other food there :rolleyes:
There have been many instances around the world of people getting sick from sprouts. The problem is that sprouts come from seeds that come from farms. Farms tend to have animals on them and animals (even healthy animals) often carry Salmonella or E.coli O157:H7. Just a small amount of contamination can contaminate a huge amount of seed because seed is processed in bulk. Even a very low level of contamination with Salmonella or E. coli O157:H7 can cause problems because these two pathogens can multiply under the condition used for sprouting the seeds.
Here is a report from the American CDC on disease outbreaks associated with sprouts along with the Editorial Note from the report:
“7 Outbreaks of Escherichia coli O157:H7 Infection Associated with Eating Alfalfa Sprouts – Michigan and Virginia, June-July 1997 MMWR Vol 46, No 32;741
(http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/wk/mm4632.pdf)
Summary: In June and July 1997, simultaneous outbreaks of Escherichia coli O157:H7 infection in Michigan and Virginia were independently associated with eating alfalfa sprouts grown from the same seed lot. The outbreak strains in Michigan and Virginia were indist…”
"Editorial Note: These are the first reported outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 infection associated with eating alfalfa sprouts. Since 1995, four outbreaks of Salmonella infection have occurred in the United States because of consumption of contaminated alfalfa sprouts (1,2; CDC, unpublished data, 1997). In 1996 in Japan, radish sprouts were associated with the largest recorded outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infection, in which approximately 6000 cases occurred (3).
"As in previous alfalfa sprout-associated outbreaks of infection with Salmonella serotype Stanley (1) and Salmonella serotype Newport (2), the Michigan and Virginia outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 infection probably were caused by contaminated alfalfa seeds, rather than contamination ring the sprouting process. Because alfalfa seeds are a raw agricultural commodity, they can become contaminated with animal feces that may harbor pathogens such as Salmonella or E. coli O157:H7 during growth, harvest, processing, storage, shipping, or sprouting. The recurrent implication of alfalfa sprouts as a vehicle for foodborne illness highlights the need for strengthened prevention and control measures to ensure the safety of this product. Studies of alfalfa seed inoculated with low numbers of Salmonella suggest that the number of organisms present on seeds may increase up to 10,000-fold during the sprouting process (4). The effect of the sprouting process on the growth of E. coli O157:H7 is unknown. In April 1996, representatives of the sprout industry met with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and CDC to discuss research needs to identify effective methods of alfalfa seed decontamination. However, research has not identified such a method; treatments, such as soaking seeds in water with chlorine concentrations of 2000 ppm (the highest allowable concentration), reduce the level of contamination but can leave viable microorganisms that may then be amplified during the sprouting process (4). Further efforts are needed to evaluate seed and sprout disinfection strategies.
"In addition to seed decontamination, prevention of future alfalfa sprout-related outbreaks will depend on identification of critical control points to reduce the likelihood of contamination during seed production and distribution. Additional prevention approaches could include categorizing sprout growers as food service workers rather than agricultural harvesters, along with systematic inspection and certification of sprouting facilities. As with all fresh produce, consumers should thoroughly rinse alfalfa sprouts before eating; however, the effectiveness of rinsing to reduce contamination is unknown. Persons at higher risk for severe complications of E. coli O157:H7 or Salmonella infection, such as infants and young children, the elderly, pregnant women, or immunocompromised persons, can reduce their risk by not eating raw alfalfa sprouts.
“The Michigan and Virginia E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks demonstrate the value of molecular subtyping in the investigation of foodborne outbreaks. In both states, an
increase in the number of reported cases of E. coli O157:H7 infection was suggested by PFGE analysis to be a common-source outbreak rather than an increase in sporadic cases. In addition, molecular subtyping of isolates from both states by PFGE and phage typing at CDC demonstrated that these outbreaks were linked by a common strain, corroborating the epidemiologic and traceback findings. CDC has established a National Network for Molecular Subtyping (5), with four area laboratories in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington serving as reference PFGE laboratories; other state laboratories also have begun using the same method. Standardized laboratory procedures and electronic links to share data among laboratories and CDC make this network a key element of the recently announced President’s Food Safety Initiative (6) and an important aspect of outbreak detection and coordination.”
Didn’t he grow up to become the Jolly Green Giant?