Sprouts have been off the Baldenario Approved for Novices™ menu for decades and are unlikely to return anytime soon . . .

Especially at this time of year (late-Spring through early-Fall) when leafy and other vegetable production occurs in California, uncooked salads are off the Baldenario Approved for Novices menu, as are all fresh vegetables, although tomatoes, cantaloupes, and watermelons from the Deep South are tasty Baldenario Approved for Novices treats . . .

[NOTE: California has a virtual festival of high-intensity feedlot operations, many of which are adjacent to fresh produce farms, and this simply does not work. Beginning in late-Fall and continuing through late-Winter everything moves to the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, where there are no high-intensity feedlots, bugs, or much of anything else other than the usual influx of "visitors" from our neighbor to the south, so if you simply must eat uncooked salads, then use a bit of prudent common sense and wait until the Fall and Winter . . . ]

However, cantaloupes, watermelons, strawberries, tomatoes, and everything else from Mexico, except avocados, are not on the Baldenario Approved for Novices menu, which also is the case with cantaloupes and watermelons from Guatemala and Honduras, since these also have had contamination problems over the past few years . . .

The best strategy is to cook everything yourself and to heat it to at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes or longer, and to limit fresh produce to tree fruit grown in the US, such as apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, apricots, pluots, lemons, oranges, grapefruit, and limes, as well as US grown cantaloupes and watermelons from the Deep South . . .

The reality is that eating fresh salads is a typically liberal concept similar to the so-called "green" concept for running the vehicles of the future on what in the Deep South is called "moonshine", or in its more well-known names, "ethanol" and "bourbon whiskey" . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbon_whiskey

In some respects it sounds great, but the people who do the work tend to exist in Utopian realities where there is no need to wash hands after using the toilet, because in Utopia everything and everybody is happy all the time and there are no germs and viruses, especially when the world is viewed through a bong-induced purple haze, really . . .

Really! :-o

My grandmother wouldn't allow anything on our table that hadn't been cooked thoroughly. We never had a food borne illness.