Tainted tomatoes: The latest food scare

“Eye that pasta sauce with caution,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial. “Order carefully the next time you cruise into the Taco Bell drive-through.” And whatever you do, skip the BLTs. Last week, nervous Americans stopped eating tomatoes after the Food and Drug Administration determined that the highly popular fruit had caused more than 220 cases of salmonella poisoning in 23 states, with some two dozen hospitalizations. As restaurants and food vendors pulled tomatoes off hamburgers and salads, public health officials scrambled to sort out which varieties were safe (cherry and grape tomatoes, among others) and which weren’t (plum, Roma, and standard round red). This is pretty unnerving stuff, coming as it does after several other big-time food scares. In recent years, contaminated spinach, tainted peanut butter, and poisoned seafood have all ended up on our dinner tables. “When will our indigestion end?”

Not until the Bush administration stops playing politics with food safety, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Conservative ideologues view all government inspection and regulation as unnecessary intrusions into the free market, and under Bush, the Food and Drug Administration has become even more understaffed and underfunded than it already was. But even this White House can’t ignore the furor over tainted tomatoes, said The Washington Post. Last week, the administration asked Congress for an extra $125 million in FDA funding, to be spent on hiring more workers and opening offices abroad. But without a serious effort to trace the source of these outbreaks—requiring growers to “track their products from ‘farm to fork,’” for example—contaminated food will keep arriving in markets, and people will keep getting sick.

There is a better solution, said Henry I. Miller in the Chicago Tribune, and it doesn’t involve tens of thousands of new inspectors. Irradiating food wipes out nearly all pathogens; if even half the meat and poultry eaten in this country were irradiated, up to 900,000 cases of food poisoning and 300 deaths could be prevented annually. So why isn’t this modern technology utilized? “Organic food advocates and other food-kooks” adamantly oppose irradiation, insisting against all scientific evidence that brief exposure to low-level radiation somehow changes food in some sinister way. The same kooks are blocking genetic modification of plants to make them more resistant to bacteria. Now that tomatoes have joined the long list of foods making people deathly ill, you’d think the Luddites would “permit science, common sense, and decency to trump ideology.” But “I’m not betting the farm on it.”

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