Review: Food Sanitizer

Disinfecting your fruit and vegetables is a must here and has become second nature to us. I don't think we could go back to the States and not wash everything we bring home from the store at this point. The thought alone makes us sick.

So you have a few options. There are several kinds of chemicals you can buy at the stores here. They are supposed to be tasteless, but we always had a problem when soaking soft-skinned fruits such as blackberries (found once) or strawberries. You can also use bleach to wash your stuff, but the same thing with the taste issue.

Some friends of ours were planning their big move to Mali and told us about a product they had seen and were considering buying. It is the Lotus Food Sanitizer. It claims to sanitize using ozone (O3) which kills everything using that radical extra oxygen molecule. I can say that we haven't gotten sick from what we ate in our house in over a year of using it now. It comes with a spray bottle that you can use for 15 minutes after charging it to clean with, but it does not help with grease or anything else that plain water would have a hard time with. The problem is that there's no way to know if it's working, so we just go back to regular Lysol. It also claims to neutralize odors on things like dog beds, but in this heat our dogs are way more powerful than some stray oxygen molecule.

The best thing though is that there is no taste left at all. A con is that if you are water conscious, you have to refill the bowl each time you use it, which means 4-5 times for us after a once a week fruit and vegetable shopping trip. It also has to be pure water (I'm not sure why since it should technically make the water clean enough to drink) so if you don't have a filter for your water you'll be using a lot of your bottled water to do this when you can just use regular water for the chemical way.

Another recent use we discovered is that it is great for disinfecting baby toys. No soapy residue and no chemicals. After they dry they are good as new.

You have to buy cartridges which cost $5 each but last three months. We are glad we have it, but I would not say this is a life changing purchase like other invaluable products.