[Market-farming] market supplies: plastic bags, berry baskets, etc.

Road's End Farm organic87 at frontiernet.net
Wed May 13 13:29:37 EDT 2009


On May 13, 2009, at 12:08 PM, Garth & Kim Travis wrote:

> Greetings,
> Many customers in our market don't want new bags, but I have never had
> anyone bring me dirty bags.  It is their food that goes into them, and
> my customers are picky.

I have never had somebody hand me an obviously dirty bag for me to pack 
their own produce into (and, again, if someone gives me bags in this 
fashion, I do indeed pack into them; though many of my customers who 
bring their own bags also do their own packing, just holding the items 
up for me to add up.) I have, multiple times, found dirty bags mixed in 
with clean ones in collections of bags that the customers have saved up 
and brought to the market to give to the vendors, with the intention 
being that the vendors will then use these bags to pack produce for 
other customers.

It's quite possible that the individual person offering me the sackful 
of bags doesn't know that there are dirty ones mixed in. Other 
household members, and/or visitors to the house, may be less fussy 
about what they put in the sack; visitors may even have mistaken the 
sack of used bags for a general trash collection. (In my own house, 
even when I try to explain the system to visitors, I've often found 
that after others have been here there's general garbage in the 
recycles, in the clean newspaper kept for lighting fires, even in the 
can that holds dry cat food. It's unreasonable to expect everyone to 
understand all other household's systems; I just know that I'll have to 
check, after they're gone.)

Another possibility is that the bag looked, at first glance, clean when 
they put it in the sack: but the grocery had bagged meat, or something 
else drippy, in the bag; and a few drops that weren't obvious when 
fresh have turned into a stinking miasma as they rotted. I have come 
across bags that had no visibly obvious contamination, but which stank. 
This wasn't always obvious from the top of the stack; but any pathogens 
might nevertheless have contaminated adjacent bags. If you do accept 
quantities of used bags in this fashion, I urge you to at least turn 
them all out and check them before you start handing them out to 
customers.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
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