Are salad bars safe during pregnancy?

What does the evidence say about salad bars during pregnancy?

1. Seafood ingredients at salad bars carried Listeria monocytogenes in 44.1 percent of samples in a retail survey, and smoked salmon accounted for 86.7 percent of those positives. 1
2. Salads carry more risk than most other ready-to-eat dishes because they combine uncooked ingredients with extensive hand contact during assembly, with no cooking step afterwards to fall back on. 1
3. Listeria keeps multiplying during cold storage, so a chilled tray is not a pause button, and the longer an ingredient has been open the more chance it has had to reach a level that causes illness. 2
4. Bacterial counts on ready-to-eat leafy greens climb by roughly a full log unit across shelf life even at a proper 4°C, and rise further once a pack has been opened. 3
5. Cold food needs to stay below 4°C (39.2°F) to stay out of the range where bacteria grow quickly, which is the standard a salad bar either meets or does not. 4

Is salad bars safe in each trimester?

• First trimester. Salad may be one of the few things that appeals right now, and you do not have to give it up. Build from the plain vegetable bins, add a dressing you pour yourself from a bottle, and leave the seafood, deli meat, cheese crumbles, and sprouts in their trays.
• Second trimester. Work lunches and grocery-store salad bars become routine around now. The bins closest to the sneeze guard edge and the ones that look picked-over have usually been open longest. A bar where everything sits down in ice and staff swap trays often is a genuinely different proposition from one where it does not.
• Third trimester. Appetite is often large and time is short, so the salad bar is tempting as a fast meal. Eat it soon after you build it rather than carrying it around for hours, because a dressed salad sitting warm in a bag is back in the range where bacteria multiply.