Listeria warning...

[Sejjie70]

Please, please if you're buying pre-packed salads & giving them to your poultry as a treat make sure you wash them thoroughly. Have just found out that Kryten (our new gander) has died from listeria & after lots of tests & checks on the enclosure & our other feathered beasties the only thing he could have contracted it from was the salad we'd been giving them all as a treat. The chances are Smeg also had it (though it's too late to confirm it now) so I advise you to either wash any pre-packed chilled foods thoroughly (whether it's for human or animal consumption) or not give them at all. I hasten to add that the whole head of lettuce, loose "unpacked" salad stuff or the stuff grown in gardens/allotments is fine, it's just the pre-packed stuff that has higher levels of listeria.

Have also since been told that as the grass has been so slow-growing this spring animals have been grazing right down to the soil increasing the chances of picking listeria up from the soil. While the levels in our soil are down a normal, low "background" level the fact that the grass is so slow-growing at the mo means my feathered beasties possibly had higher than normal levels so the salad then pushed the levels up very high.

[Mo]

That makes you wonder why people buy prepacked in the first place. It doesn't seem very labour saving if you have to wash it anyway.
I'm too mean and old fashioned.

[Sheila D]

Apparently, prepacked salad has 27 times the amount of Chlorine that you would find in swimming pool water! Which makes it extremely unattractive!