Im in the UK....The population here eats millions of
pounds of bagged salads per year. God knows why. I've just read a book by a reporter who has travelled the globe following the food industry trail. She exposes some terrifying revelations , facts and truths about the global food industry.
Here in the Uk the bagged salads are washed in chlorinated water that is 20 TIMES stronger than a public swimming pool. Then a gas is pumped into the bags, like you say, to keep them as fresh as possible. (i dont remember the name of the gas - but believe it's going to be something nasty and toxic - this is the food industry don't forget - it's all about profits - not health)
When i was at school, during the holidays i worked at a fruit packing plant for pocket money. We were washing tangerine segments in warm chlorinated water all day. We had no breathing masks given...or gloves in fact!
I would get home wheezing from the chlrine vapir i had been breathing all day, feel very lethargic, but boy were my hands clean! hahahaa
If you cannot buy your fruit and vegetable loose and (really) organic then it's really not worth eating those pre-prepared, silly-excuse-for-a-salad-in-a-balloon-bag. There is no nutritional content worth talking about in any preprepared foods...unless you pre-prepare it yourself from fresh - minus the chlorine!
( Have you noticed how very unhealthy, junk, trashy, high-fat, hydrogenated -fat filled foods are incredibly cheap?!! Anything that is remotely healthy will be double , or triple the junk food alternative. This is the sickness of the food industry. It is designed to build us full of toxic chemicals, so we then become reliant on the health service, who become more reliant on our taxes, which go up every year because we need better health care and equipment...yadda yadda...)
It concerns me that an apple can be sprayed up to 20 times per growing season to preven disease and pests affecting the crop.
It concerns me that its cost me 3 times more to buy an apple grown in the UK (where i live) than to buy an apple imported from New Zealand.
It really concerns me that a shrimp farmer in Indonesia, who works all hours, gets pennies for 20 kilo of shrimp, when we are charged over £3 for a frozen handful.
The global food industry is a concern.