Senior News Line: When will salads be safe to eat?

I’ll be the first to admit that when I recently strolled through the vegetable aisles at the store, trying to decide what to buy, my overriding feeling was one of concern.

A show of hands: How many have avoided salad products for several weeks now? Between iceberg lettuce causing a massive cyclospora parasite outbreak because the defective product was sent to retailers and restaurants, we also have jalapeño peppers and cucumbers with salmonella.

They say — they, being the experts — that while we should avoid bagged salads, it’s OK to eat whole head lettuce as long as we throw away the outer two or three leaves and then wash the rest under running water.

For right now, I’m going to pass. Those same experts concede that completely washing cyclospora off lettuce leaves is very difficult.

Buying from your local farmers markets might be the best bet right now, until this cyclospora outbreak goes away.

Listeria has surfaced, with the producer voluntarily expanding its own recall, and the list of potential bagged items affected is long: green beans, bell peppers, yellow and zucchini squash, and cucumbers.

The produce was sold at a wide variety of retailers across many states. But it’s not only salads that are a problem right now.

There are the 1.5 million dozen eggs contaminated with salmonella and sold under different brand names. And we have organic blueberries with E. coli.

And pistachio nut butter, made in Italy and sold by a big-box store, that’s contaminated with salmonella.

Our best bet: Sign up for email alerts that will tell us quickly what foods are being recalled. Start with fda.gov/food and include alerts from foodsafety.gov and fsis.usda.gov/recalls.

Consumer Reports, at consumerreports.org, will send phone alerts for food recalls if you sign up. Put “food safety alerts” in the search box.