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If your produce is spoiling faster than you can eat it, you may want to try storing it differently. Tharon Green/Anna Gragert/CNET
With grocery prices what they are, having to toss spoiled food is an even more bitter pill to swallow. While your compost pile thrives from unused fruit, veggies and salad greens, most of us would rather see those items on the plate than in the bin.
To see if produce bags -- marketed as fountains of youth for your salad staples -- really work, I put three to the test, including the free compostable bags available at my grocery store, Thrive Market's mesh bags and Ambrosia's chic linen produce bags.
For the test, I used red bell peppers and romaine lettuce, which I stored in these bags inside my refrigerator's produce drawer. I did so for two weeks, which the USDA's FoodKeeper app says is the consumption limit for both peppers and lettuce if they're refrigerated after purchasing.
Here's how long the produce bags kept my food fresh, and which performed the best.
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Day 1: Starting off fresh
I purchased my romaine lettuce and red bell peppers from my local Trader Joe's. While there, I picked up the 100% vegetable starch-based compostable produce bags available for free in the produce section.
What the produce looked like on the day of purchase, and all the different produce bags used. Anna Gragert/CNET
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