The Tragedy of the Tomato

The three-month long crisis with salmonella on tomatoes, or is it peppers? or is it scallions? or what is it anyway? sheds a very bright light on why local food is better.

Some people have gotten sick from salsa, and some never eat salsa so that couldn't be the source. Apparently the infected tomatoes are contagious enough that slicing one in a restaurant kitchen and then cutting some other food could contaminate the other food.

In a recent article I read, apparently the FDA was surprised to learn that tomatoes are commonly "repacked", together with tomatoes of the same size and appearance, from other areas. Sometimes U.S. grown tomatoes are mixed with tomatoes from Mexico or other countries, and sold as a product of the U.S. The FDA investigators have had an incredibly hard time tracing tomatoes to their farms of origin. Tomatoes are often held in warehouses for months before sale. They have become the perfect anonymous vegetable. Nobody can tell where they were grown, or when, or how. Therefore there can be no traceability, and no responsibility when something goes wrong.

One of the tragedies is that many large tomato growers have had to plow under their crop, worth sometimes $100,000 or more, because people are afraid to buy tomatoes. This is true even for growers whose tomatoes have tested perfectly clean with no trace of salmonella saintpaul. An entire industry is on the ropes right now.

Approximately 1,000 people have been sickened by the present time, though very few have died, and there's no end in sight. There is little or no progress in the investigation, except to widen it still further, due to the anonymity of the modern tomato. If warehouses are contaminated, many other vegetables could now be affected.

The E coli spinach of 2006 was much easier to trace, because bunches of spinach are held together with twist-tie labels from the company that produced them, which happened to be Earthbound. Painful at the time, but the cause was easy to find--overflow from the feedlot down the road--and easy to fix. With tomatoes there's no end in sight.

Yes, in case you wondered, your home garden tomatoes (once they get ripe) are perfectly safe. Our CSA tomatoes and locally-grown tomatoes, kept out of the commodity stream, are safe. One of the reasons to eat local food is the "face behind the food", farmers who know their product, and know that it is safe.