<p>I never wash veggies that say they’ve been washed. So, OP, you would have been disgusted at my house when I would have served those carrots direct from the bag. I wash other things, but not very well, I’ll confess. </p>
<p>My husband doesn’t wash anything – fruit, veggies, meat – no matter where they’ve come from. </p>
<p>We also ate Thanksgiving turkey a week after cooking it.</p>
<p>Perhaps we have ironclad stomachs. We haven’t gotten sick yet.</p>
<p>"I do wash and dry off the tops of cans before I open them, do you all do that? "</p>
<p>Not with the new openers that cut neatly though the rolled edge.</p>
<p>Fireandrain–I’m with you. I tend to think the washing mantra is overdone. My H, a former doc and biologist, thinks it’s mostly unnecessary. actually, I think he’s in the camp of believing that over-sterilizing is the reason so many kids have immunity issues. </p>
<p>but then, he grew up in a family that eat raw chopped meat out of the package, so… </p>
<p>I do know we rarely get sick, certainly not food-borne.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I’ve sent my D out into the world of other people, and she’s picked the rituals up, so I have to be careful around her.</p>
<p>^^I do tend to agree with you Garland. Not that we raised the kids in filth…but we did practice the 5 second rule with pacifiers and the dog did a pretty good job of keeping the kids faces clean when they were little. We tend not to wash and sterilize everything we come in contact with or put into our bodies and probably eat food long past the recommended storage time (thinking back to the Turkey thread at Thanksgiving). We all rarely are ill and must have pretty darn good immune systems. I don’t eat red meat but did prohibit Steak Tartare and do rinse poulty…something I wasn’t thoughtful about in younger years. I keep remembering when they thought hair driers caused cancer…whatever happened to that??</p>
<p>I rinse or wash everything: meat, fish, veggies, fruit. I even rinsed strawberries in a mild bleach solution some years ago when there was the e coli scare. I am certian if someone observed all of my habits, she would see some inconsistancies. And if you observed DH, you would really see inconsistancies because I doubt that he washes anything (I try not to watch so I don’t get grossed out).</p>
<p>I even quit eating Christmas cookies years ago at my in-laws after watching the decorating process (too much finger licking for me). It’s a personality flaw.</p>
<p>Speaking of finger licking, a receptionist I work with licked her finger EVERY TIME she turned a page in a report she was handling…then handed it to me. Now THAT grosses me out!</p>
<p>I only wash meat if it’s been sitting in my fridge too long and feels slightly slimy or smells slightly off. I rinse fish briefly. I wash vegetables except the prewashed carrots and lettuce. Though I wash lettuce when it gets old and dh nearly always washes the lettuce. I don’t think washing helps get rid of e coli the biggest problem with lettuce. I don’t think bleach is good for you so I just hope for the best on that front. I grew up in Africa and honestly I can’t remember the last time I had an intestinal problem. I think I’m immune to every bug out there! I’ve never been big on getting things super duper clean and my kids for the most part seem to have good immune systems too.</p>
<p>
I guess that’s how I feel.</p>
<p>I appear to be a minority of one… but I wash almost nothing. Lettuce if I see dirt/grit on it. Always spinach (except sometime pre-washed if it looks like they’ve done a good job). Use a brush on mushrooms - I believe that water is the enemy of good sauteed mushrooms. Use a brush on potatoes. </p>
<p>Meat? Virtually never. </p>
<p>People wash fruits and vegetables with dish soap??!? Now <em>that</em> grosses me out… do I want to be eating soap?</p>
<p>My H and S will eat leftover pizza for breakfast, that has been left on the counter. They love it. Doesn’t hurt them a bit (and we are talking pizza with sausage on it… whatever.</p>
<p>Wash egg shells before cracking them? </p>
<p>Of course, I will not let antibacterial soaps and such like into my house. I’m a firm believer that the overuse of antibiotics is a huge problem. </p>
<p>Eating a little dirt that clings to lettuce or a potato? As my FIL used to say at every picnic or lunch on the beach… “everyone needs to eat a peck of dirt in their [sic] life.”</p>
<p>I am <em>religious</em> about separate cutting boards for raw meat/poultry vs. everything else. Never cut directly on the counter; always on a washable cutting board. No knife or cooking fork that goes into raw meat ever touches other food items. But that’s about it for me in terms of carefulness in food preparation.</p>
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<p>That’s always been my take on things. You need exposure to a fair amount of germs in order to build up that immune system. My son was never sick more than once a year from K-12th (it was usually strep). College on the other hand has been a different story…he was sick twice his 1st semester (cold/flu-like symptoms) and it took forever to go away both times. Think it was a combination of dorm living and stress from pledging a fraternity. He definitely wasn’t taking care of himself…skipping meals, lack of sleep. I guess dorms have a different set of germs than he got exposed to at home.</p>
<p>BTW-my best friend was a lab tech for many years and won’t go near a hot tub, swimming pool or a hotel bathtub. She said they are virtual cesspools of germs despite the chlorine.</p>
<p>The best defense you’ve got against digestive issues is the “good” bacteria growing in your gut. </p>
<p>It is rather disgusting to think about this, but the new thing on the medical horizon is fecal transplants – it seems that they have managed to resolve a huge number of previously untreatable intestinal/digestive maladies by literally ingesting someone else’s poop into the intestinal tract of a person who has lost their natural defenses, most likely through too much exposure to too many different antibiotics. </p>
<p>We Americans are accustomed to thinking of germs as being uniformly bad, but the reality is that our bodies function like little ecosystems populated by billions of microbes. So the people eating the unwashed and untreated stuff may be the ones who are in better shape… I mean, a little bit of unwashed carrot muck might be just the thing to keep the good stuff flourishing.</p>
<p>And when I go to a pick-your-own farm, I eat the strawberries and applies right there, no washing.</p>
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<p>I’ll eat 'em right there if they’re organic. Not if they’re conventional. Strawberries and apples tend to have some of the heaviest pesticide applications of any crops. Yuck!</p>
<p>“…by literally ingesting someone else’s poop into the intestinal tract of a person…”</p>
<p>I don’t think you mean ingesting…maybe inserting?
<a href=“http://www.slate.com/id/2282768/[/url]”>http://www.slate.com/id/2282768/</a>
Ingesting generally means by mouth…ewwww…</p>
<p>
I won’t do that and I’m not super-vigilant. I am picky about potatoes (my nickname is Spud, after all), but other things not so much. I clean fresh fruit and don’t let my kids drink unpasteurized juice or milks. My D1 has long-term stomach problems and I recall a few years ago (very few) an outbreak of ecoli poisoning from a local apple orchard in which cows were relieving themselves near the orchard and the apples were contaminated before being juiced. A couple of people died.</p>
<p>I think water parks are much, much more dangerous than food.</p>
<p>I am not a big washer of food in the kitchen , but am diligent about not cross contaminating cutting surfaces and knives between meat and veggie / herbs. I use my plastic cutting boards a lot because of this.
I believe that people go overboard with the washing and humans need a little exposure to germs to be able to fight off sicknesses. No one in my family has ever had a food born illness , with the exception of my youngest daughter who once ate raw chicken Mcnuggets.</p>
<p>I love to eat the veggies right in my garden as I weed and I plant grape tomatoes near the edge of the garden so I can grab a handful as I ride by on the mower. I wash fruit from orchards and have never washed red meat. I never wash potatoes that are going to be peeled and then boiled. I don’t worry/obsess that much and I am pretty healthy.</p>
<p>I rinse veggies and fruits. Not bagged lettuce nor baby carrots. The thought of washing with soap is more disgusting to me than a little dirt. I rinse meat occasionally, usually if it seems extra bloody. I do wash cutting boards thoroughly and keep meat separate.</p>
<p>I’m in the camp of people are too germ-o-phobic. My 2 boys and I are not and we are very healthy. H is, and he’s sickly. I know that could all be coincidence, but I do think we need to develop immune systems.</p>
<p>I grew up eating raw cookie dough. I still think ovens are not all that necessary to good cookies. I like my meat pretty rare, although I know exactly where the beef came from, since I fed him out. Is that considered a mitigating circumstance?</p>
<p>A couple of years ago my mother was out of town and my little sister and I were baking cookies. My mom had always forbidden consuming raw cookie dough, so before we popped them in the oven we looked around to make sure dad wasn’t watching and took one little bite each. I ended up spending the entire night vomiting. I don’t believe for a second that it was anything but coincidence, but you should have seen the horrified expression on my sister’s face when she discovered me sleeping on the bathroom floor the next morning. We’ll never go near raw egg again! </p>
<p>My mom got a real kick out of that story when we finally fessed up.</p>
<p>With the exception of poultry I don’t think that it is germs or dirt that I am washing off of my food, I am concerned about pesticides. The way I understand it is that the ecol i is in the food not on the food, so washing wouldn’t help there.</p>
<p>You know, I thought of this when we had the thread about eating in the grocery store-- the grape testers are eating pesticides! :P</p>
<p>To be honest when I wash fruit and vegetables I am more concerned about germs from them being handled at the store or in transit, which is probably why I don’t feel that rinsing accomplishes much. Which is part of the reason I mentioned being skeeved out by the idea of eating in the grocery store! People put their hands all over the produce trying to pick the <em>best</em> ones and then put the rest back for you to stick in your mouth. Ew!</p>