Drop the tomato and no one gets hurt

Saturday, June 14, 2008

No doubt you’ve heard about the great Tomato Salmonella Outbreak of 2008, right?  The total number of people who contracted salmonella poisoning from commercially produced and handled tomatoes now numbers 228 people from 23 states.  Federal authorities are baffled - they have no idea where the contaminated tomatoes came from - could be Mexico, could be Florida.  The feds are saying that you can eat cherry and grape tomatoes or regular tomatoes with vine still attached to them.

Oh, and homegrown tomatoes.  You know, since most people who grow tomatoes don’t wipe their hands on raw chicken or beef infected with salmonella and then go out and pick tomatoes, or water the garden with groundwater contaminated with diseased animal poo..

The feds do know that the salmonella strain in this case is Salmonella serotype Saintpaul, a rare variety.

During times of salmonella and other food illness outbreaks, I am generally comforted by the fact that I don’t buy much of my food from commercially produced sources.  I trust the farm from which I purchased my CSA share - I tend to think of them as not much different than me growing my own food (except they do so on a larger scale).  My food is safer.

Yesterday Newsweek published an article about the tomato/salmonella issue, and discussed whether or not locally grown tomatoes are safer.

“As a scientist, I cannot say smaller is better. It’s just not that simple,” says Martha Robert, a microbiologist at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and a safety adviser to the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange and the Center for Produce Safety at the University of California. “The large packers we have are extremely stringent with sanitizing techniques and measures to prevent cross-contamination, but if someone makes a mistake when they’re mixing or dicing large quantities, the problem is going to be larger too,” she explains. “But sometimes a small grower has been doing something for years, and [they] don’t know they’re putting themselves at risk.”

While both large corporate farms and small local farms can be at risk of contamination at any stage of the growing, packing and shipping process, experts say some differences between big corporate farms and smaller farms can be a factor. Industrial producers are more likely to move their packaging plants close to, if not onto, the farmland in order to get the produce on the road as quickly as possible, says Gonul Kaletunc, associate professor in the department of food, agriculture and biological engineering at Ohio State University. In that situation, water contaminated with salmonella from feces, insects or plants might be used to both irrigate and wash the produce, increasing the chances of contamination.

While I can understand the reticence to pronounce small family farms safer than industrial agriculture, I think we have to remember that every food-borne illness outbreak I can remember in the last couple of years has been traced to some large-scale corporate farming operation.  And large packers may have all these “extremely stringent” rules for handling food, but FDA inspections are down - how can anyone be sure the packers/handlers/growers are following the rules?

No, I still feel safer buying my produce from a local farmer who stays in business because his or her reputation is everything - I trust that a small, local farmer (particularly one committed to sustainable farming and ecologically ethical use of land) is making the extra effort to produce high quality, uncontaminated food because an outbreak of salmonella means losing the family farm.

And really, when was the last time you heard of an e.coli or salmonella outbreak originating from Joe’s farm down the road?