Why You’re Better Off Washing and Cutting Your Own Fruit and Vegetables
It’s tempting: a bag of pre-cut broccoli florets from the supermarket refrigerator aisle, or a container of fruit salad for a snack. We can certainly imagine that after a day at work, you really don’t feel like tackling an entire cauliflower. (Although cutting cauliflower is super easy with this tip). But still. Those containers and bags of pre-cut vegetables and fruit do have quite a few drawbacks…
And again, we get it. Here too, a bag of pre-cut green beans routinely goes into the steamer once a week when there’s little time, or we pimp some instant noodles – no shame. But I really try to avoid it more often than that, because this is why vegetables and fruit that you buy and cut ‘whole’ are better:
Much more expensive in proportion
The price per kilo of a bag of ‘snack apples’? € 11.11. No joke. The price per kilo of a 2.5 kg bag? € 1.60. I’m not really sure what other words I could use to describe this. Hand them out if necessary, if you hate having to deal with the other 2,410 grams of apples left over after eating the 90 grams in one bag.
Pre-cut fruit and vegetables can contain harmful bacteria
Fortunately, large-scale outbreaks involving salmonella, E. coli and listeria bacteria are rare in the Netherlands. You can also get sick from pre-packaged meat (do you remember the poop-meat-gate?). But various types of lettuce (and spinach in America in the past) can become contaminated with E. coli through fertilization or irrigation with polluted water.
By mixing these vegetables with other varieties and distributing the contaminated batch across a whole lot of bags, the contamination can spread quickly. That doesn’t mean that a loose, whole head of lettuce is always safe by definition, but the spread of infection risks could be less extensive.
The more whole, the fresher
Oxidation can cause certain nutrients to be lost, which is a shame. The same applies to storing them for a long time. According to the Netherlands Nutrition Centre, it’s best to eat pre-cut vegetables and fruit on the same day. Frozen vegetables are an exception: because they are frozen almost immediately after harvesting, hardly any nutrients are lost. That’s good news, because frozen green beans, roasted very hot in the oven, are perfectly welcome here too!
Something is better than nothing
There is one important thing to remember. If cutting and/or peeling your own vegetables and fruit means you won’t eat them at all, then for goodness’ sake buy a bag of pre-cut produce. You’ll still get some vitamins, fiber and their other beneficial properties!
And something is always better than nothing. So if you really refuse to cut a bell pepper the way Gordon Ramsay does (or at all), or chop a melon into pieces, by all means get one of those bags. But for the planet (all that plastic, aaarrgghh) and your wallet, you’re of course better off doing it yourself.
Also read:
- How to keep your groceries fresh 10x longer
- How fresh are canned vegetables, really?
- Put it straight in your cart: the most underrated frozen vegetable
