Much of modern living is based around convenience, and retailers are always looking for ways to make things easier for their paying customers. For example, knowing how time-consuming making a tossed salad can be, many produce companies offer bagged salad that people can simply tip onto their dinner plates.
But convenience can have a dark side ... or maybe a brown side, which is the color lettuce turns when it goes uneaten for too long. And, apparently, that's what's happening.
According to Wrap, a British government advisory group, about 40 percent of all of the bagged salad sold in the United Kingdom ends up in the trash, not the stomach. That translates to 40,785 tons (37,000 tonnes) of lost leaves, or 178 million bags of salad.
The supermarket chain Tesco took a close look at the problem and possible fixes, including selling the salad mixes in resealable bags. The hope is that the new bags will still allow people to do what they tend to do -- namely, buying the salads with no particular use in mind and letting them sit in the fridge for weeks -- but without the poor outcome of spoilage.
"We know many shoppers roll up their bagged salads after using them once and stick them at the back of their fridges where they are forgotten," Adam Hill, Tesco's produce buyer manager, said. "We’ve been working with our growers to develop new packaging which allows customers to return to their bags of salad over a number of days with very little hassle."
A look at lettuce:
- Lettuce is 95 percent water, which is why it needs to be eaten fresh and not frozen or canned.
- There is more nutrition in darker leaves of lettuce than lighter leaves.
- More than half of all lettuce produced in the world is grown in China.