Bagged Salad Shouldn’t Exist

Picture this: Your fridge is empty, so you  find yourself down at the grocery store, trying to make healthy choices.

You grab a bag of mixed greens from  the produce aisle, and haul it home.

Then, if you’re anything like me, it  ends up shoved to the back of the fridge until all the really good  stuff you bought is gone.

So you rediscover it weeks later only  to find that your precious greens are … surprisingly still good enough for a salad!

Bagged salads can stay fresh in your  fridge for much longer than seems possible.

And you might not think I’ll be  able to talk about a salad bag for the entire length of this video,  but you bet your brassicas I’m gonna!

Because that unassuming bag shoved  to the back of your fridge is a miracle of industrial farming, atmospheric  control, and polymer chemistry.

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This story doesn’t start in the salad bag.

It starts in the refrigerator itself. In many parts of the world, refrigerators  are a commonplace kitchen appliance.

But it wasn’t always that way. The home refrigeration revolution  swept across the US in the 1940s, and caught on in other parts of  the world in the decades to follow.

And while this was amazing for the  makers of corny fridge magnets, it was also great for households.

Once upon a time, a home cook would need to trek to the grocer pretty much every  day for fresh ingredients!

But with a fridge in the  kitchen, grocery shopping was reduced to a once-a-week chore.

And with that chill revolution,  even delicate veggies like lettuce could be shipped from farm to fridge  and live to tell the kale – tale.

Americans across the country  started eating more salad at dinner, and the execs at Big Lettuce  were eager to cash in.

It was simple enough to ship an entire  head of lettuce to grocery stores, but pre-chopped leaves were a different story.