“Never Mind”
Who knew Emily Litella worked for the Food and Drug Administration?
CNN tells us FDA lifts warning on tomatoes
(CNN) — Tomatoes are again safe to eat, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday, weeks after the food was blamed as the source of a salmonella outbreak in several states.
The federal agency lifted its warning about tomatoes but left in place a warning about jalapeño and serrano peppers, which it said could pose a risk to elderly people or people with compromised immune systems.
The source of the outbreak of salmonella still isn’t known, but the FDA said the epidemic is “waning.”
I guess there were no more tomato farmers left to bankrupt, so it was time to move on to the people who grow peppers.
11 comments
We’re not sure which vegetables are contaminated, and we’re not sure about the livestock either…
Next everyone will remember the chicken fajitas. This is absurd, they don’t have the people or resources to conduct an investigation, but they are wiping out farmers.
This kind of stuff always makes me think of the comment by Geroge Carlin( I think).
“So what about all those Catholics suffering in hell for eating meat on Friday?”
There were a lot of people hurt by the tomato call on Florida, not just the farmers themselves, but the pickers and their families. It’s not like there’s a lot of work for them to make up the losses.
Perhaps they intend to wipe out the farmers.
That may not have been their intention, but that was damn sure the result.
As a descendant of a farm family and as a sprout-eater who eats tomatoes just about every day, I have to say this kind of thing pisses hell out of me. I understand the desire to be quick in avoiding a dangerous situation, but this is really ridiculous… and devastating to farmers.
I know from my local shopping that no one was buying tomatoes, even the ones that were listed as good. Restaurants just stopped using them, as didn’t the fast food places. It has been a disaster.
It’s the Roman/British empire all over again! 😉
They discovered in some century (I forget that detail) that it was eating tomatoes off of, or cooking in, pewter was literally driving the wealthy mad and in some cases, killing them. Often, they would go into toxic shock and people would think they were dead and bury them. It didn’t bother the poor much, since they couldn’t afford pewter. The acid from the tomatoes leached the lead out of pewter. There was also the fact that the elites began using lead pipes for their plumbing.
So know you know why all the wealthy elites are nutjobs, especially the *old* families! 😉 LOL
Apart from that bit of history… I agree the FDA response and actions are pathetic and should be criminal. I won’t hold my breath for that.
I saw that warning about peppers today on the morning news. They even said people should avoid eating Salsa. Yup… let’s destroy another crop.
I never stopped buying tomatoes. The odds of getting sick are pretty remote and really, isn’t any food you buy in a store a risk? I only trust my home grown veggies to be completely safe. And my tomatoes were still green at the time. I grow my own veggies and herbs so I can have pesticide free foods, but now it has the benefit of being safer and cheaper.
You wash things off, that’s the easiest way of controlling these problems. Of course, my Mother peels tomatoes which involves heating the outside on an open burner on the stove, so most of the possible contamination is either burned or discarded.
She does it because the new varieties have very tough skins for shipping, you don’t have to do it with home-grown tomatoes.
Over enthusiastic use of lead-based solder on copper plumbing will cause the same problems, as will storing alcoholic beverages in lead crystal containers, using crockery with lead-based glazes, and hundreds of other things.
Currently a lot of the Washington, DC water system has too much lead in it from early plumbing practices.
No need to get into the use of heavy metals in the medical area through the early 20th century.
We have been poisoning ourselves for a very long time. If you look at a pesticide container and read all of the warnings, why would anyone think it was a good idea to spray this stuff on food?