Bacteria in bags easily avoidable

‘‘Here we have the party of personal responsibility now taking the view that the public are incapable of making sensible decisions when the need is made clear to them.’’

Where we see shopping bags, David Seymour sees body bags. The ACT leader warns the nation will pay a price of maybe 20 deaths a year for requiring people to make the perilous transition from so-called single-use plastic supermarket bags to reusable bags.

Poisoned, they’ll be, by the seeping juices of imperfectly sealed raw meats contaminating other products piled into the same, increasingly unclean, bags. Because that’s what some people do.

As a caution that the transition to reusable bags should be seen as a prompt for some – let’s face it – pretty basic food hygiene messaging, his comments might be useful. But to mount this as a case for sticking with standard supermarket bags, which seems to be what Seymour intends, is more alarmist than alarming.

And it can partly be answered by a retort that is simple, not simplistic. Swiftly comes the supermarket response that appropriate chiller bags are best for meat and chilled food, and that these can easily be kept clean. The whole ‘‘different bags’’ concept isn’t that much of a conceptual leap nowadays, surely.

To be fair, Seymour isn’t making up the problem of juices escaping meat packaging, as more than a few mightily displeased shoppers can attest. Safely packaging meat is an imperative that needs to be addressed by the vendor, under the stony attentions of the Food Safety Authority and its minister, Damien O’Connor.

Seriously, are we really being asked to accept the view that stuff’s going to ooze out of our raw meats and there’s nothing much that can be done to stop it? Let’s be a little more ambitious about the possibility of prevention. We should anyway, regardless of the mode of carrying the meat to our homes.

Seymour seems to have settled on his fatality count by working off a 2012 US research paper which shows a switch to reusable bags ‘‘killed’’ about five people a year in San Francisco. Actually, people’s own dangerously bad personal food safety practices killed them, and this should be the focus of attention.

In this respect, ACT seems to be acting out of character. Here we have the party of personal responsibility now taking the view that the public are incapable of making sensible decisions when the need is made clear to them.

The transition to reusable bags is, on balance, reasonable and environmentally responsible. That is not to suggest it’s an entirely straightforward matter. There are issues, not the least of which is that the greenness of reusable bags is dependent on people hanging on to them long enough. And yes, this in turn makes keeping them clean all the more important.

(Let’s acknowledge, too, that the description of the familiar, outgoing supermarket plastic bags as ‘‘single-use’’ is readily contestable when so many people do use them at least one other time once they get them home. Not that this swings the balance.)

Far from being a no-brainer, the transition to reusable bags requires some thought, by the consumer as well as the supermarket and the Government regulators. Seymour favours the continued use of the outgoing bags, but to advance this argument he has seized on an approach that people need to be protected from themselves. And taken it too far.