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  • From: Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] market supplies: plastic bags, berry baskets, etc.
  • Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 13:29:37 -0400


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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