CZEdwards

Well, it was nice having raw vegetables while it lasted.

this is an elaboration of a Bluesky thread I wrote off the cuff yesterday. Here’s the original thread. I’m incorporating comments I made into the text.)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-food-safety-inspections-plans/

The FDA is ending routine food safety inspections, which means food poisoning outbreaks are going to be bigger, last longer, and go undetected longer than they were when we had routine random checks. Leaving it to state and local authorities means those agencies — which are already understaffed and under-funded where they are functional at all — will have to take on a complete federal agency’s responsibilities, with no additional money or staff, and without authority over other states. So if Arizona biffs a Romaine harvest with e coli, Kansas doesn’t have any way to pull that Arizona Romaine off the shelves. We federalized food safety for really good reasons.

Historically, the vegetables we’ve worried most about are romaine lettuce and leafy greens, especially in bagged salads. Romaine is a great crop for shipping, it’s really sturdy, it doesn’t crush and it remains fresh for a good long while, but it has one major flaw — it grows upright and with gaps between the leaves. Most e coli is spread by irrigation water, which is not tap water. It’s basically straight from the canal, which means if a cow shat in it 200 miles up the Colorado River — which cows do — that e coli will still be in the irrigation water.

Romaine, by the nature of its tulip shape, captures irrigation water as it grows, and if that water has e coli, that e coli gets a decent survival environment with recurring moisture and enough warmth. Washing in the field after harvest does help, but as the repeated recalls of salad greens and romaine have shown, it’s not perfect, and it doesn’t take a lot of missed e coli to make people very sick.

So my first inclination with the end of routine inspections is to get a lot pickier about what fresh vegetables come into my house. I am a full on convert to the Church of the Precautionary Principle, in that if there are ways to significantly reduce harm that only require minimal behavioral changes or inexpensive shifts, I will make them parts of my habit, such as masking in public places, or driving less. The way I approach the Precautionary Principle for food is knowing the most common vectors and minimizing my interactions with them, and knowing the most useful food prep processes.

Since bagged salad and Romaine are high potential vectors, my reasonable changes are to switch back to iceberg lettuce and other tight crisphead lettuces (which will mostly be farmer’s market items or from your own garden). Whole Iceberg is extremely unlikely to become contaminated because of the nature of its shape. Since its leaves overlap each other, that keeps water out of the main body of the head, meaning there’s no place for contaminated irrigation water to collect. In the field, when harvested, most of the outer leaves, which might have come in contact with e coli irrigation water, are left in the field to be plowed under, and we tend to remove the outer couple when we get iceberg home from the store, because those leaves are often bruised or limp. Iceberg becomes a potential vector when it’s chopped up and mixed with other lettuces in bagged mixes, especially with Romaine. Other greens like baby spinach, arugala, and kale have all had smaller scale salmonella and e coli recalls, so similar care should be taken with them. The baby versions are very tender, so they won’t stand up to much vigorous washing, but the adult versions can usually stand a good soak in sanitizer water. (See next paragraph)

Sanitizing water is one of our best tools for most vegetables. There are four main types, three can be easily made at home with household products, one requires sourcing a specialist product, and one requires buying a generator. The simplest is household, chlorine bleach. About 1 teaspoon per two liters of water makes a solid soak. Submerge your produce in it, wait five minutes, then drain and rinse. Second are the acids. Acids will break down the cell walls of bacteria, thereby killing them. (They’re not so good on viruses). The common household acids are white vinegar (acetic acid at 5% solution) and citric acid powder (lots of household uses, from dishwasher tabs to cleaning calcium from water kettles to fruit preserving). For vinegar, you use 1 part vinegar to 8 parts water (for ease of use, that’s 1 cup to 2 liters or 2 quarts) or 3 tablespoons of food grade citric acid powder per liter/quart of water. Soaking time is what does the sanitizing work; you have to let the sanitizer do its job. Five minutes is a minimum, ten or more is fine, too.

The harder to source version is peroxyacetic/peracetic acid, which is a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid; it’s a professional sanitizer aimed at the food processing industry, and if you source it, follow the manufacturers instructions.

The one that requires a generator is hypochlorous acid (HOCL) and I’ll go into detail on that one near the end of this article.

Here is a complete list of sanitizing liquids. https://www.food-safety.com/articles/5323-clean-up-that-food-an-update-on-sanitizers-and-disinfectants

Bagged baby carrots have been another e coli vector, so my inclination would be to go back to cutting my own damn carrots. We’re all well aware now that “baby carrots” are actually fully grown carrots that were misshapen, that are peeled with high pressure water, then cut into appealing small sizes, right? (If you weren’t, well, now you do.) Instead of baby carrots, pick full sized carrots, scrub them well with running water, give them a 5 to 10 minute fully submerged soak in sanitizing water, rinse, then peel and cut into your preferred shape. Since you’re not going to get the perfect shapes baby carrots get, make that part of your plan and cut on an angle for carrot chips, or as sticks, or coins (not for small children!) or diced.

We also know that cantaloupe, by the nature of their netted rinds, can become an e coli vector. What happens is e coli gets on the rind, the rind retains some dirt, and then when we get the melon home and cut into it, the e coli on the rind gets on the knife and then transfers from the knife to the previously perfectly fine melon flesh. The strategy with all melons is to buy them whole (not precut at the store) wash the rind first, with soap and water, then rinse. If you’ve got sanitizer solution, let the melon rest in there for a few minutes, then rinse, then cut, and discard the rinds.

We’ve had smaller food borne illness outbreaks with other vegetables. The strategy with more sturdy vegetables, like broccoli, carrots, fresh green beans that you want to serve raw? Blanch them. This is bringing a big pot of water to a boil, then putting your raw vegetables in the water for at least 3 seconds, but usually 10-15, then immediately dunking the vegetables in ice water to stop the cooking. Since most food borne illnesses are on the surface of the food, boiling water will take care of that, but what we like about raw vegetables is the crispness and crunch. A short blanch will make broccoli more vividly green, will make it a little sweeter, and will handle any bacteria on the surface, while leaving it pretty crisp. And most of the sturdy vegetables that you blanch will be fine in the refrigerator for a week.

Blanching isn’t great for more delicate vegetables like greens or cucumbers or peppers. You can blanch tomatoes; the skins will slip off, so you only want to blanch right before serving. On the other hand, tomatoes and peppers of all sorts are a perfect candidate for sanitizing water, spray them down, wait a few minutes, and wipe them off. Their insides are fine, it’s just the surface that runs the risk of food-borne illness. With American waxed cucumbers, peel and slice, then store in lightly acidulated water (a teaspoon of citric acid powder or 2 of vinegar per liter). In this case, the acidulated water is to keep them crisp, not to sanitize. Hydroponic cucumbers — baby and English in the plastic wrapper — will be fine, you just need to rinse them like you would any produce. You should sanitizer soak snow and sugar snap peas you intend to be eaten raw if you don’t know if they’re hydroponic.

Cooked vegetables do make good salads, if handled well. Frozen vegetables, when steamed, will be food safe, without a problem. They can then be cooled and refrigerated (follow normal food safety procedures about getting temps down and into the fridge). Consider the wide range of chopped salads made all over the planet, from Fattoush and tabouli (parsley, cucumbers, tomatoes) to cold succotash (corn and beans), variations on Cobb salads, and Paul Newman’s Spoon Salad (https://www.eatingwell.com/recipe/252486/use-a-spoon-chopped-salad).

Consider mixing steamed or roasted butternut squash with lightly sautéed baby spinach, chopped apples and pecans in autumn. Your imagination is the limit here; cooked vegetables do play well with others.

Onions have been an e coli source — it’s the irrigation water problem — so plan to cook most, and what you have to have raw, slice/dice and soak in one of the acid-based sanitizer mixes. Onions can take on flavors very easily, so chlorine is not the best option, but also rinsing your onions reduces the unpleasant sharpness.

My next recommendation is grow your own greens. I’m a big fan of hydroponics; they’re not cheap to start, though there are DIY solutions that can get you going for under $50, but at that price, you’ll probably find a ready to use countertop system at various stores (use the shopping field on your favorite search engine).

Aerogardens ( https://aerogarden.com/gardens/farm-family/farm-12-xl.html) are the OG countertop hydroponics, and they’re excellent. They’re reliable, they last for years. The major problem is they’re small, second is they’re not inexpensive. A 6 spot Aerogarden will produce about enough lettuce for one person to continually harvest for one daily salad, starting on about the 20th day and lasting potentially as long as the 60th day. Plan on having one per person in your household, or going with a larger system like one of these from A Hope Garden (https://ahopegarden.com/products/44-seed-pods-vertical-hydroponic-garden)

With hydroponics, you do have to wait for about 20 days from seed starting to a harvestable crop, and they will be tender, baby greens, but you’ll also know exactly what went into them. I recommend the all in one units for people just starting with hydroponics because they’re intended as intro to hydro. You will need fertilizer for your hydroponic water because plants need potassium, nitrogen, and phosphate as well as some trace minerals; Schultz liquid plant food or Miracle Gro are actually perfectly fine.

With hydroponics you should also stagger your start dates. If you want continual lettuce from the 44 spot AHopeGarden up above, the first week, you plant 10 lettuces, the second week you plant another 10, and so on. When the first ten have been consumed, wash their net pots, compost the stuff you can’t eat, and start another 10 lettuces. You should plan to harvest and replace lettuces about every 35 days, because they get bitter once they hit about 40 days old. If you can set up a fan, or set up your system in a room with a ceiling fan, that helps, because lettuces prefer to be cool, and if they’re too warm, they go bitter quickly (because they think it’s high summer and time to flower and make seeds for next year’s lettuce).

You can also grow lettuces in container gardens, as simple as a bag of potting soil in a 5 gallon plastic bucket with a few holes and a quart of gravel at the bottom. Lettuce again loves cool weather, they like moisture, and they like part shade. If you have room and can build a cold frame (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_frame), you can grow lettuce outdoors most of the year. The principle of successive plantings also holds for container garden lettuce. It’s not going to be cheap to start, but lettuces are the easiest plants to grow at the baby greens level, and can be a big confidence booster for people with a historically black thumb.

These solutions? For the Attention Deficit, like me, hydroponics is the way to go. It’s easy to forget a pot on your back porch; much harder to neglect a blinking red light and a drooping, drama queen lettuce on your kitchen counter. Drama queen plants (the ones that wilt if you even speak the word dry) are EXCELLENT for ADHD because they’re very obvious, and also forgiving. Give them a drink and they perk right up. And lettuce is absolutely a drama queen.

You also have the option of microgreens, which are VERY baby greens grown on a mat of jute, coconut coir, or paper in a plastic or metal sieve tray with a water reservoir underneath For a starter kit, my best recommendation would be Garden Republic’s $30 kit (https://www.shopgardenrepublic.com/products/garden-republic-microgreens-growing-kit) and a packet of extra soil disks, but they are sold out as of this writing. (Put yourself on their waiting list.)

Second best would be most of the kits at True Leaf Market (https://trueleafmarket.com/collections/micro-green-kits),the one at your price point. For seed, Botanical Interests (https://www.botanicalinterests.com/search?q=microgreens&options%5Bprefix%5D=last”) is not the cheapest place to buy microgreens seeds, but they are very reliable and have a great selection, and good sized packets. (I really like their Umami mix). Pea shoots are also really excellent, and one of the most appealing microgreens for kids. They’re sweet!

And of course, there are kits on ‘zon, but I don’t recommend ‘zon unless there’s no other option. But “microgreens kits” will bring up a large assortment at many prices.

You harvest microgreens at about 10 days old, usually just as they’re getting their first adult leaves, and you just snip them off right about the substrate. They’re very reliable for even novices, and microgreens have a lot of nutrients. And they’re a quick payoff. They just need light, from a sunny kitchen window or a set of under-cabinet lights.

And then there’s shop local and seasonal — find a CSA or a local farmer’s market/farm stand, and only buy your lettuce there, and only buy the lettuce grown locally. Smaller farms are far less likely to have e coli breakouts. When in doubt, skip it and have a wedge salad week. (https://www.marthastewart.com/8128457/perfect-wedge-salad-how-to>wedge salad)

Is this all a burden? Yes, 100%, and it sucks! This is going to be hell for people with disabilities and very tight time constraints, because we’ve gotten used to paying someone else to take these steps. If you have someone in your life who is independent but their independence requires bagged salads and pre-cut fruit, your mutual aid task for them is to figure out how you can be their sous chef, as well as your own, because you’re going to have to do this for your household, so you might as well do it for one additional person and drop off the prepped stuff for them. Be honest and open and have the discussions about mutual aid.

Families are going to have to make a sous chef prep part of their weekly chores, and everybody who can is going to have to participate. A five year old can crank a rotary grater (https://www.macys.com/shop/product/nutrislicer-3-in-1-spinning-rotating-mandoline-countertop-food-slicer-grater?ID=11345817) or push the plunger on a safety mandoline (https://verniershop.com/products/mandoline-slicer?_pos=1&_sid=e81ea66f2&_ss=r?variant=42276821499974) safety mandoline, a ten year old can be in charge of monitoring the sanitizer soaks and bagging/boxing up food to go in the fridge. Teenagers can stand at a stove and blanch broccoli or brussels sprouts or carrots. I cannot tell you how your family will organize it, but I can tell you the more honest communication and the more urgency you can convey as the project manager, the more your kids and spouse are likely to understand this is part of their responsibility, and the alternative is completely unpleasant — no more fresh vegetables or fruit (and no ultra-processed food replacing it, just canned and frozen fruits and vegetables.)

If you’re completely on your own, my recommendation is it’s time to switch entirely to frozen vegetables with exceptions only for hydroponic vegetables, like the expensive plastic containers of lettuce from Kalera and English/baby cucumbers. Once frozen vegetables are cooked, those will be safe, they can portion to single servings easily, and they can be rinsed after cooking in cool water and become a salad.

This sucks, no doubt, and it’s eugenicist and ableist, but protecting ourselves from eugenics and ableism is our first defense against their malice. Fuck you, I won’t die like you want is incredibly powerful.

If your community has a food handler’s certification course or ServSafe class, go get certified. There will be probably a low fee — $15-30 is the usual. It’s often a very short class, sometimes only a “read this book, take a multiple choice test”. There’s a good chance it will feel minimal or even useless, especially in the red states that do have the requirement because they’re not doing it in the interest of food safety, they use it as gate-keeping to keep immigrants from food handling jobs because too often, those tests are only in English. (Arizona, I might be looking at you in the 1990s. Assholes.)

However, the course, or this set of documents from the USDA (https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation), is an excellent refresher for food temps, hold times, and produce prep, and that’s what we need right now. If you’re using the documents, make sure you download them, since we can’t be sure how long they’ll be available.

Meat will also become more dangerous. While meat inspections are partly USDA and partly FDA, both groups are being gutted. Meat’s dangers are e coli, but also salmonella in poultry and beef, and listeria in raw and prepared meats.

Fortunately, all three can be killed by cooking the meat to 165° F for 3 seconds. That means for deli meat sandwiches, your meat has to go on a plate and into the microwave to cook until it steams before you make a sandwich with it. If you have a sous vide set up, you could seal your deli meat in a sous vide bag and pasteurize for an hour and a half at 140° F (for all three — listeria is a tough bastard), then chill in an ice bath and put in the refrigerator for later use. (For more details on sous vide pasteurization, Anova has a great chart here. (https://anovaculinary.com/pages/sous-vide-pasteurization-guide)

Ground meat especially needs to be cooked to 165, and I wouldn’t recommend it for sous vide pasteurization. E coli is still a surface problem in meat, but once ground, all the outside, contaminated surfaces are now inside surfaces. Thus why when we have a bad e coli outbreak in meat, it’s almost always ground beef.

Steaks are where things get dicey. If your steak is an unadulterated, unpenetrated chunk of cow muscle, then you can eat it rare, because the surface of the meat where the e coli is will be heated well beyond 165° and killed. The problem is our technology lets us make very tender steaks out of tough chunks of meat by running them through industrial tenderizers (https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2013/06/has-your-steak-been-mechanically-tenderized/index.htm). They’re motorized pokers that run the meat through some disks or needles to break up the tough muscle fibers, and in doing so, force surface contamination down into the interior, while leaving the surface looking absolutely intact.

We also have meat glue, which allows us to selectively bind protein fibers together. This means we can take very thin sheets or scraps of beef and roll them into pinwheels to make seemingly solid pieces of meat (See: the bacon-wrapped “filet mignons” that go for $3-6 each at the grocery store), but it also brings former surface into the inside. On Precautionary Principle, it’s risky. (Note: Meat glue isn’t BAD, it definitely lets us use the maximum meat we can so we’re not wasting the very expensive and environmentally costly animals, but it comes with risks that are best mitigated by fully cooking the product.)

So: if you are certain your chunk of cow is fully intact — which probably means you bought it from an independent butcher, not a grocery store, or you bought only flank or filet from Costco — you can have it as bloody as you want as long as you exposed it to fire or a griddle for long enough to brown. (With Costco, you CAN and should ask the meat manager if any specific package is blade tenderized. They will know and will tell you. It’s supposed to be on the label if it is, but that’s Costco policy, not everywhere.) From regular grocery stores, and at lower price steak houses like Outback and Golden Corral or fast casual sit down like Chilis and Applebees? Be less forgiving and have the chicken, the fajitas, or the prime rib instead. When shopping, if it says Blade Tenderized, fully cook it, or plan to sous vide pasteurize it. If it doesn’t say, ask a lot of questions of the meat department manager.

Are tenderized steaks a common vector of e coli? It has happened several times, though far less commonly than ground beef. Capitalism is ALWAYS a case of, “when the Federal Cat’s been fired, the mice get up to gross shenanigans.” We do know ground beef has been a major vector, and the difference between tenderized and ground beef is more a matter of degree than difference.

Chicken and turkey’s bigger issue is Salmonella, the non-typhoid version of Salmonella. They HAVE to be cooked to 165 or sous vide per the Anova chart above. Nobody wants chicken breast tartare anyway, so that helps, but the danger with chicken and turkey is contaminating your kitchen before you cook it.

(Typhoid fever, which is a different species of Salmonella and the one Mary Mallon carried, can be vaccinated against for travelers. Typhii salmonella IS NOT endemic in the US — we have under 500 reported cases a year, mostly travelers coming home with it, and probably no more than 5000 total cases, including undiagnosed, unreported ones. If Typhii goes endemic in the US again, we have bigger problems than just food safety — it means our water sanitization system has broken down entirely. If you want to get typhoid fever vaccinations, feel free, but be aware you’ll probably have to pay for them, you’ll need to re-up every 5 years, and they’re effective against severe illness and death, but there’s still a chance you might get a milder case if you’re overseas where it’s endemic. And it won’t protect you from the salmonella common to poultry and reptiles.)

The most common way a kitchen gets contaminated is washing meat. When you run cold water over raw meat of any type, that cold water does not make anything infectious go away, but it does distribute it all over your sink, and possibly your countertops. DON’T WASH YOUR MEAT. () So don’t wash meat. You’re just making a bigger salmonella contamination zone, and your vegetables or pasta could easily come in contact with the wider contamination, thus giving you a case of Salmonella despite fully cooking your bird.

The second most common way is sharing utensils — especially cutting boards — between raw meat and food that will not be cooked or is ready to be served. Ideally, you have a set of plastic cutting boards and knives that are only EVER used for raw meat (includes deli meat), and a set of boards and knives used for everything else. If you used tongs to handle your raw meat (including putting it on the grill and turning it over on the grill) use clean tongs to remove and serve it.

If you don’t like touching raw meat or find it unpleasant to touch it before washing, instead of washing, please use gloves and remove them properly () or consider reducing your meat consumption, or transferring your consumption to pre-cooked meats (canned and ready to eat frozen). Those are all better mechanisms to avoid food borne illness than washing meat.

If you ever worked in fast food, then you remember the santizer spray we used on trays, tables, and counters. It’s just water with a few drops of household bleach, and it works very well to sanitize solid surfaces. Get a spray bottle to keep on your counter and swab the counter down between tasks. Spray it on, wait a couple minutes (the wait time is when it does the work!) and wipe dry.

You also remember that we used cloths, not sponges. Sponges become a bacterial harbor basically the first day they’re used, and all of the dishwasher or microwaving in the world isn’t really going to stop that, it just slows it down. Better option is to use dish cloths or Swedish dish cloths, which are a heavy paper that can be washed several times in the washing machine before it disintegrates. Let them dry completely and put them in the laundry basket when they get dirty.

If you’re sensitive to bleach, the best alternative is hypochlorous acid, which is a body safe, skin safe acid that humans actually produce as part of our immune and healing response. If you’ve had a tattoo or piercing and gotten a bottle of cleansing liquid, it’s highly likely to have been hypochlorous acid. It’s also incredibly effective at killing bacteria and viruses. When we saw video of the Chinese fogging streets and apartments as part of their Covid Zero work? They were using hypochlorous acid. It’s safe to drink, and it is an alternative to bleach for sanitizing vegetables, too.

The downside to hypochlorous, and the reason it’s not in everything, is until the past couple years, it just wasn’t stable enough to bottle. (We’ve figured out the technique now.) It would deteriorate back to water, salt and a little acid within hours or a day, so to have a supply, you needed to keep a generator on hand.

The household sized ones are not the cheapest appliance you’ll buy, but they’re in line with a cheap vacuum or an Instant Pot. They run about $150. The one I have, a prior generation Eco One, is available here (https://hyposource.com/products/ecoloxtech-eco-one-hypochlorous-acid-generator) and it is reliable. I use a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of white vinegar, and liter of water to make 400 ppm hypochlorous on most days. I do recommend getting chlorine test strips (the same ones used for pool management) and some litmus paper to make sure you’re producing the acid. After you run your generator, the water that was testing 0 or very low on chlorine will be up near 200 or 400, depending on the length of cycle, and the ph will have dropped to around 5, so a mild acid. Here’s a good tutorial on testing efficacy of your generator. (https://www.libertysprayers.com/blogs/news/about-hypochlorous-acid-hocl-anf-hypochlorous-acid-generators)

There are, apparently, tutorials for DIYing a generator, you’re free to look that up on your own, but personally, I don’t have a lot of faith in DIYing with water and electricity, even very low voltage electricity. If you’re going to go DIY, definitely make sure you have chlorine test strips and litmus paper and know how to use them, and be vigilant.

The better bet would be, instead of DIYing, search for a “disinfectant generator”. They’re $12-20 USB devices you plop into a liter of salted water which electrolyzes the water and re-arranges the electrons. Let me let Neal Stephenson explain, quoting from his book, Zodiac (page 136 of the paperback).

Ionic chlorine’s easy to get. It’s in seawater, […]. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron. And it’s just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical power between the wires, and current — a stream of electrons — flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye, or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This process is called Chloralkali.”

(You should read the book, if you haven’t. Especially now. The book is 30 years old and extraordinarily relevant. And it’s from when Stephenson was being edited so it has an ENDING!)

At household levels, chloralkalai is perfectly safe. (When you do it at industrial levels is when you start making toxic waste.) The little USB devices do exactly what happened using Niagra Falls’ enormous power supply, but at tiny scale. So those make bleach. But when you add acid to the salt water, it makes hypochlorous, so use the 1 teaspoon vinegar with the 1 teaspoon of salt per liter of water, and you’ve made hypochlorous.

Technology for stabilizing HOCL (hypochlorous acid) has improved, so it is now possible to buy it bottled, if you want to test it out without buying a generator. Just keep the opaque bottle closed and it’ll stay effective for a while. HOCL has a very faint chlorine odor.

Order of preparation of food matters a lot. When you’re sous chef’ing, cut all of your vegetables first, with onions and tomatoes last (onions because everything will taste of onion if you do them first, and tomatoes because they’re significantly more juicy than everything else). Clean your countertop, switch out your cutting board or wash it if you only have one, then cut proteins, and don’t use that cutting board again for vegetables.

Also, think like you don’t have a refrigerator. We know that acids will kill bacteria, so use that to your advantage. Shredded daikon and carrot salad, with rice vinegar, chili and sugar? From Vietnamese cooking? Marinating vegetables in vinegar limits their bacterial load. Same for marinated cucumber salads — there are literally thousands of these recipes, from every cuisine that has ever used a cucumber. And same for pickles. Sauerkraut is a vegetable, if you like it, it counts. Yes, pickles ARE vegetables, and they count as vegetables. Whoever told you they weren’t was full of shit.

This is US guidance, because our government is full of homicidal, eugenicist nitwits and outliving them is the best fuck you we have. If you’re not eating US produce, you don’t have to follow this. Extra food safety won’t hurt you, but if you don’t have to, please enjoy trusting your government for us.