http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,1206245,00.html

What's in your bag of salad, and how did it get there? Felicity Lawrence 
investigates

Saturday May 1, 2004

The Guardian

In an idle moment, I decided to reconstruct the contents of a 99p bag of 
washed and ready-to-eat salad. Of course, you are not meant to do this, 
the whole point of bagged salad being that we are too busy to wash our own 
lettuce leaves, let alone count them. But I wanted to know how many you 
get for your money. Erring well on the side of generosity, I reckoned that 
for roughly £1 I had bought two leaves of frisée, one leaf of red 
radicchio and two leaves of a pale green, crunchy variety of lettuce. This 
portion was livened up by 18 tiny whole leaves and seven torn pieces of 
dark green leaves about the size of a 2p coin.
Bagged salads did not exist before 1992. Now, two-thirds of households buy 
them regularly. The value of the UK salad vegetable market had, in fact, 
grown by 90% between 1992 and 2002.

This does not mean we are eating 90% more salad - volumes have grown only 
by 18% over the same period - just that the food industry has found ways 
to make much more money out of salad.

Thanks to global sourcing and advances in packaging technology, we have 
got used to the idea of eating a variety of salads all year round. 
Modified-atmosphere packaging (Map) can increase the shelf life of 
prepared salad by over 50%, making it possible for supermarkets to sell 
washed and bagged salad from around the world. Lettuce and salad leaves 
are harvested from fields in the UK, southern Europe or the US one day and 
reach a packing house either the same day or a day or two later if 
imported. The salad is cut or separated into individual leaves by gangs of 
workers, then washed in chlorine, dried and sorted, before being packaged 
in pillows of plastic in which the normal levels of oxygen and carbon 
dioxide have been altered. This slows any visible deterioration or 
discolouring. The salad is then trucked to a distribution centre where it 
will be dispatched for delivery to the stores. Map keeps it looking fresh 
for up to 10 days. Some lettuces imported from the US are kept fresh in 
Map for up to a month.

Unfortunately, some research published in 2003 in the British Journal of 
Nutrition suggested that this new invention to prolong shelf life and 
provide us with convenience while multiplying profits might actually 
destroy many of the vital nutrients in salad.

A team of researchers and volunteers at the Rome Institute of Food and 
Nutrition had conducted an experiment. They took lettuce grown by a 
cooperative and gave it to volunteers to eat on the day it was harvested; 
lettuce from the same source was then given to volunteers to eat after it 
had been packed in Map and stored for three days. Blood samples of the two 
groups were analysed after they had eaten the salad. The researchers noted 
that several anti-oxidant nutrients - which protect against ageing, 
degenerative disease and cancer - such as vitamins C and E, polyphenols 
and other micronutrients, seemed to be lost in the Map process. The 
volunteers who had eaten the fresh lettuce showed an increase in 
antioxidant levels in their blood, but those who had eaten lettuce stored 
for three days in Map showed no increase. The researchers noted that 
nutrient levels fell at a similar rate in lettuce stored in normal 
atmospheric conditions, the difference being that a lettuce stored 
normally showed signs of limpness after a few days, whereas with Map the 
illusion of freshness is preserved.

When the results of this trial were published, they provoked a defensive 
debate among packers in the UK. Jon Fielder, director of a company called 
Waterwise, which sells ozone-based disinfecting systems to salad packers, 
wrote to the trade magazine the Grocer: "It is commonly acknowledged that 
Map does have an effect on the depletion of nutritional value of salad, 
however it is the chlorine used by most UK packaged salad producers in the 
washing process which has a far worse effect on consumer health. In most 
cases, the salad leaves are immersed in water with chlorine which is an 
oxidising disinfectant. The chlorine level is usually maintained at a 
minimum of 50mg per litre - 20 times higher than in the average swimming 
pool." In fact, the Italian researchers had not used chlorine, so the Map 
must have been responsible for the nutrient loss, but it was a helpful 
addition to public knowledge to have the industry view on chlorine washes.

Chlorine washes leave surface residues of chlorinated compounds on 
lettuce, and because of this the process is banned in organic production. 
Some chlorinated compounds are known to be cancer-causing, but there 
appears to be little research on those left on foods treated with high 
doses of chlorine.

"As well as disinfecting out the bugs, they disinfect out the taste of 
fresh leaves, as anyone who has eaten salad straight from the garden 
knows," Fielder points out. But controlling bugs is all important. As 
Fielder says, "In a litigious society, and with the prospect of damage 
from bad publicity, no supermarket dare risk having E coli food-poisoning 
bugs on the salad they sell."

There appears to be good reason for supermarkets selling prewashed salads 
to worry. Between 1992 and 2000, the period in which bagged salads took 
off, nearly 6% of food-poisoning outbreaks were associated with 
ready-to-eat salads and prepared fruit and vegetables. In 2000, two 
serious outbreaks of salmonella poisoning in the UK were traced back to 
lettuce. One person died as a result.

Once the market started growing so rapidly, the government's Public Health 
Laboratory Service (PHLS) decided to monitor bacteria levels in salads. A 
study of refrigerated ready-to-eat salads sold at retail stores in the UK 
in 1995 found that 6.5% contained listeria and 13% E coli bacteria. The 
most recent PHLS survey in 2001 found salmonella in five samples and high 
levels of listeria in one sample of ready-to-eat salad from three major 
supermarkets. One of the samples containing salmonella also contained E 
coli bacteria. Fuller investigation subsequently uncovered an outbreak of 
salmonella poisoning in different parts of England and Wales caused by the 
salad. The majority of the samples were fine, but, as the authors of the 
study pointed out, the new methods of packing raised new dangers.

Effective decontamination of ready-to-eat vegetables is difficult. E coli 
bugs are usually spread from human or animal faeces, either from the 
unwashed hands of farm or packhouse labourers, from manure that has not 
been properly composted, or from contaminated water. Good hygiene 
practices are essential to controlling them. But Fielder, even as someone 
who sells disinfecting technology, says, "The longer the factory chain, 
the harder it is to control contamination. I always feel I should wash the 
lettuce I buy, even if it is bagged and 'ready to eat'."

Standards of hygiene in factories and packhouses themselves are generally 
high and meticulously monitored. But in almost every other respect the 
system of employment that prevails in the food industry today militates 
against decent conditions.

The preparation and packing of fresh foods such as salad are now dependent 
on cheap, casual labour. That cheap labour has been largely provided by 
migrant workers. The labour-intensive business of sorting, washing, 
cutting and packing leaves by hand could not be done without them.

Casual and frequently itinerant labour has gone together with agriculture 
for as long as anyone can remember. Many farms are no longer simply places 
where food is grown, but sophisticated, industrial complexes built around 
packing sheds and lorry parks. When they are not harvesting and packing 
their own produce, the big farms today are trucking or flying in supplies 
from abroad and packing them.

My research suggests that at least half of the workforce in food packing 
is now illegally employed. Exploitation is not the exception but the norm. 
Authorities investigating the illegal use of labour can see a pattern 
emerging right across the country, and fear it bears the hallmarks of a 
series of mafia operations.

It works like this: gangmasters set themselves up as "employment agencies" 
in the form of one or more limited companies. They recruit workers from 
abroad, sometimes being involved directly or indirectly in smuggling them 
in and providing them with false documents. The gangmasters provide 
housing and transport , which not only ensures that the workers remain 
completely dependent on them, but also disguises the fact that they are 
paying less than the minimum wage. Rents deducted for squalid housing are 
often extortionate. They charge the packhouses, factories and farmers VAT 
and deduct tax and insurance from the workers' pay packets, so the 
companies' books are kept clean. The gangmasters then go bankrupt, owing 
between £1m and £3m in unpaid tax, insurance and VAT, much of which will 
have already been moved offshore. They then appear as phoenix companies, 
with the same directors supplying workers to the same sites just days 
afterwards, but trading under a different name. Clone companies are also 
created, which provide subcontracted labour to the mother company to 
disguise the frauds and get round restrictions that prevent bankrupts 
being directors of other companies. Violence and crime of other sorts go 
hand in hand with these illegal activities.

When the English outdoor salad season comes to an end in late October, 
much of the production moves to Spain. Several large English producers 
have acquired farms there, mostly in the Murcia and Andalucía regions, to 
enable them to guarantee year-round supplies of salads to supermarkets.

Spanish farms are also the source of many of the Mediterranean vegetables, 
such as peppers and aubergines, sold in British supermarkets, along with 
tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, out-of-season broccoli and organic produce. 
Quite apart from the climate, the costs are lower there, and the exchange 
rate favours euro countries when it comes to exports.

EU structural funds have helped create this new horticultural industry. 
They have paid for a motorway network to be driven right through Spain, so 
that refrigerated lorries scarcely have to leave the dual carriageway as 
they plough from Almería in the south to the farther reaches of northern 
Europe.

The land in that part of coastal Spain is arid, and the regional 
governments are proud of their "miracles", saying that, like the Israelis, 
they have made the desert bloom. Dramatic economic growth has transformed 
an area that was until recently among the poorest in Europe. Thanks to 
intensive farming, the Almería area alone now produces nearly 3m tonnes of 
fruit and vegetables annually, mostly for export to the UK, Germany, 
Holland and Belgium, earning £1bn in export revenue a year. But the 
success story is already losing its varnish. There is talk of EU social 
funds being needed to pay for a planned abandonment of some of the lands 
where the soil or water is most polluted. Its critics say the "miracle" is 
ravaging the area.

I arranged to meet Hector Gravina early one morning in a hotel favoured by 
British package tour companies on the Costa Blanca. The Spanish organic 
farmers' association was running a conference here and the chief of 
agri-environment from Spain's ministry of agriculture would be attending. 
Gravina, a veteran campaigner from Spain's Friends of the Earth, in black 
leather jerkin, with a tiny pigtail curling down his neck, enveloped me in 
a great bear hug and a swirl of roll-up cigarette smoke. "You have chosen 
a good day. Our tour bus is going round one of the most beautiful nature 
reserves of Spain. I can show you the most intensive agricultural 
production in the country, the fields of plastic, and then you see organic 
lettuce being grown in the shadow of the farmhouse that inspired our great 
playwright, García Lorca, to write Blood Wedding. But first we will have 
it from the horse's mouth. Let's catch the man from the ministry."

The chief of agri-environment, Manuel Ariza, had just arrived. Hidden 
behind sunglasses, his eyes gave no clue to his sympathies when I asked 
what he saw as the main issues for Spanish agriculture. "Agriculture is 3% 
of our total GDP. Intensive farming represents 50% of the total 
agricultural area. It is mainly concentrated in the Mediterranean arc. We 
are Europe's California," he said, solemn as a textbook, then his whole 
body heaved with laughter. "So we have all their problems, problems with 
water - pollution of coastal waters, exhaustion of ground water, problems 
with soil degradation ..." Then he disappeared into his official car while 
we piled on to our bus.

The beauty parade


In the supermarket beauty parade, an apple must look good in front of the 
camera or risk rejection. A Dutch firm provides packhouses with machines, 
which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, to measure cosmetic 
perfection. The 'Greefa Intelligent Quality Sorter' takes up to 70 colour 
pictures of every apple on the conveyor belt to determine the 'blush of 
non-equally coloured fruit', and to grade it by size. It can detect 
deviations of as little as 1mm². So if the supermarket specification says 
that an apple of a particular variety must be, say, 15-17% blush red on 
green, it can 'grade out' or reject any that are 18% red on green or a 
miserable 14% red on green. The beauty parade often means the difference 
between profit and loss for the farmer. Anything 'graded out' ends up, if 
the farmer is lucky, as fruit for juice at giveaway prices of 3-5p per 
pound, but as often as not it will just go to waste.

Then there's the penetrometer, a spring-loaded tool to measure the fruit's 
resistance. 'I had the buyer round and he said my pressures were out,' 
says John Dickson. 'He admitted my Coxes were the best he'd tasted, but 
they weren't hard enough for his shelf life. He told me I'd have to pick 
earlier. No wonder people complain fruit doesn't taste of anything. They 
also get tested for starch and sugars and all that. I test mine the 
traditional way, with my front teeth. I can't get very excited about all 
this.'

It's the same with plums. Dickson grows 32 varieties, can start picking in 
July and still have plums at the end of October. But the supermarket 
season lasts only a few weeks, and they'll take only three varieties. 'The 
market for Victorias used to work really well. The largest went to the 
fruit market, the middles to canning and the smalls for jam. Now the 
smalls get thrown away and most of the middles do, too. They've got to be 
38mm, unmarked, with stalk, to pass muster. The specification covers two 
sides of A4. The shape must be "typical", they must be more than 50% 
coloured, but they've also got to have a four-day shelf life. That means 
they've got to be picked rock-hard. Plums need to be picked and eaten 
within a day or two to taste good. I can see an enormous supermarket from 
my fields. I asked if I could supply it direct with plums that were ripe, 
in peak condition. It can't be done.'

Size matters, too. The fruit that survives the penetrometer must then 
conform to supermarkets' vital statistics. For Dickson, this presents its 
own problems. 'When I was a boy, 60mm was considered the ideal size for an 
apple: that would be five or six apples to a pound; you'd sell 65mm ones 
for a premium. But 65mm gave you four apples to a pound. Now supermarkets 
want a minimum of 70mm from me, so you only get three to a pound. Which 
means most customers end up buying more: to get four apples now, you need 
one-and-a-quarter pounds.

'But to achieve bigger apples, I have to prune my trees much harder, and 
overfeed them. The apple is less well balanced because of excess 
fertiliser; it loses its flavour. Then you get bitter pit [brown spots] 
and I have to spray with calcium to prevent markings.' A Cox may have been 
sprayed up to 16 times by the time it reaches the shops.