Just make sure before you eat ANY raw vegetable (or even cook it) to wash it thoroughly. One thing people forget though, is to wash their hands before handling, and after! Let’s say you wash your hands, and then wash the veggie, whatever was on it (if anything) is now on your hands. so, wash your hands again. 🙂

I posted a good summer tomato recipe here if you are interested (for when they are ready to harvest, of course!) 😀

Mediterranean Chilled Stuffed Tomatoes

And be wary of ANY fast food outlet! Most have very poor hygiene standards. I’ve had severe food poisoning twice in the past decade (requiring over 20 hours in Emergency each time for my trouble and a lot of morphine)! Watch the staff… if they don’t wear disposable gloves and change them after each preparation, and if the place isn’t spotlessly clean, leave. We are lucky here, a trip to Emergency is fast an free. In the USA, you’d probably die.

Assuming you aren’t treating your plants to industrial growing methods and don’t live near a factory meat farm, you have nothing to worry about [other than the various critters that will try to harvest more tomatoes than you do.]

The canning process is a good way of killing most of these things, and thorough washing should be enough for anything that is wind borne.

We have 20 tomato plants in the back yard (I can them). This is unbelievable….

Gotta find a recipe for ketchup now, too, I guess?

I remember all of the farmers in my family mixing seeds instead of monoculture because “if something don’t grow, something else will”. It didn’t maximize profits, but it generally insured there would be one.

Understand that they were growing mostly for themselves and their real money-makers – milk or poultry, but the concept is sound and it avoided a lot of messing around with chemicals. Crop rotation and manure kept things going.

Anyone who has a garden knows how much better the tomatoes, lettuce and other veggies taste. No pesticides, no chemicals and now no diseases.

Fortunately my Mother hates the skins and removes them by first “flaming” them over an open burner on her gas stove. That should kill most things that weren’t washed off.

The other problem is that people wash the vegetables but don’t bother to wash their hands after handling them, so they could be smearing the “wee beasties” on their hands, washing them off the veggies, and then reinfecting the veggies when they cut them.

My grandfather was a poultry farmer and he washed his hands constantly between operations to prevent spreading anything.