Rotten Tomatoes Not From Georgia

publication date: Jun 16, 2008

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author/source: Kate Copsey / STAFF

By Kate Copsey / STAFF

I was in Pike’s Nursery the other day when I started chatting to the lady in line with me. We were bemoaning the tomato woes.

Summer and tomatoes go together well. Whether you use them for salsa, pesto or mixed in with your salad, fresh tomatoes taste wonderful. The problem is that right now tomatoes are having a bit of a problem.

The tomato plants that you grow in the garden like lots of warm weather to produce good fruit, but they will not flower in 90-plus degree heat. They were doing wonderfully until the start of June when the temperatures went right up the scale and, like humans, they delayed activity. In general, they will bloom well and pollinate between the temperatures of 70 and 85 degrees. However, do not give up on them because they will bloom as soon as the temperatures drop slightly.

The bigger problem is with the fresh tomatoes in the store. As you may have noticed, they have been pulled from most large stores and restaurants. This is due to a salmonella outbreak in several states, which has been linked to tomatoes. Due to rather shoddy information gathering it seems my fellow plant lady in Pike’s was under the impression that all tomatoes in Georgia were contaminated. This is definitely not the case.

The problem boils down, yet again, to knowing where and by whom your food is produced. The large Georgia tomato growers ship their produce to wholesale depots such as the Kroger establishment in the Midwest. Here, they get mixed with tomatoes from Tennessee, Mexico, California and any other tomatoes that are ripe that day. The facility then ships boxes of tomatoes to the grocery store near you.

When people get sick in Wisconsin, they could be eating tomatoes from Georgia or elsewhere. Finding out where the contamination came from takes time and energy, and is not started until the CDC (Center for Disease Control) finds a plausible link of illness and traces it to a product. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) can then send a task force to find the “what” and the “where from.”

Initially all tomatoes were suspect because that was the only link to the food poisoning cases. Then a few varieties such as round red tomatoes were isolated. Georgia, along with many other states, was cleared early on. And the ground itself was never claimed to be contaminated in the state, so even if Georgia was suspect, local grown and homegrown tomatoes were always safe. It is just the large growers who ship out of state, and it is one of these large growers that has a potential problem.

In most food related illnesses the culprit is not the food but the handling that causes the problem. Sometimes it is the watering/fertilization system that is contaminated, particularly for ground grown products such as the spinach that caused a problem a few years ago.

So if you have a hankering for some tomatoes for that burger or sandwich this weekend, shop at a local farmers market, or even at Harry’s who still have tomatoes on their shelves. Blakely Wolf, Associate Store Team Leader at Harry’s Farmer’s Market in Alpharetta, assures me that “we know exactly where every one of our tomatoes comes from, and we know who the grower is.” For added consumer confidence though she confirmed “we pull produce first, then find out what is safe” so anything that they sell is guaranteed as safe.

So while the FDA spends its time finding out who has contaminated the tomatoes shipped to big stores, you can still enjoy great tasting tomatoes by shopping locally and buying locally grown produce.