For the feast, I bought vine-ripened tomatoes to be drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) and fancy French salt as a simple side. However, my mother viewed them with great mistrust, as though I had missed the food news of the past week - not true, I watch channel 3 for the latest recalls every morning. But, I didn't serve up tomatoes in case others believed I was trying to poison them, in spite of the fact that my purchase was clearly on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's "safe list".
As of this Monday, 228 people in 28 states became sick with a rare form of Salmonella from eating red tomatoes grown, where exactly? No one knows, or if they do they aren't talking. All officials will say with certainty is that tomatoes that weren't ripe at the time of the recall are the ones that won't make you sick. In addition, 'tomatoes on the vine', 'grape tomatoes' and 'cherry tomatoes' are perfectly safe, and if you grew the tomatoes you have ripening on the kitchen windowsill yourself, they aren't the ones the Center for Disease Control is looking for.
It didn't take long for major food chains to pull tomatoes from menus and store shelves. There's a reason why. These businesses all have plans to implement in case of a recall: throw away the produce, send out a press release, and source another product as soon as possible. For this, I am truly thankful. So what's the deal with trace-back to the ground for tomatoes (and other recalled produce) taking more than a week? Is it the growers or the distributors that are guilty of having an inadequate trail of possession to hand over when the CDC comes knocking?
With so many consumers balking at eating this most perishable product, concerns surface that the entire industry will collapse on itself, or at the very least affected growers would be heading straight for bankruptcy. Think about this, if everyone started saying "hold the tomato", like they do now with "hold the pickle" somebody somewhere is going out of business.
I'm tired of reading that larger and larger agricultural business are so much better for the nation. The tomato industrial complex maintains that they are producing safer food than can be done on a small scale, and economists say that all small farms accomplish is to keep prime agricultural land out of the hands of more efficient operations. But small farms don't send food across the continent under multiple label names, across U.S. borders, or have the potential to afflict people on a massive scale like the big boys do.
If this most recent food recall wasn't enough of a reason to support local farms, then I surely don't know what is.
