Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Salmonella reported in tomatoes.
by Jeff Davis
It seems like there’s a new story of Americans being poisoned by our produce every month. According to Reuters, “Florida’s tomato industry is in complete collapse and growers in California and Mexico are having trouble selling their crops, as U.S. regulators hunt the source of a salmonella outbreak linked to certain tomato varieties….In Florida, the No. 1 U.S. tomato producer, $40 million worth of tomatoes will rot unless the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quickly traces the source of the outbreak and clears the state’s produce, an industry official said… ‘We’ve had to stop packing, stop picking,’ said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange. ‘The stuff that should have been harvested over the weekend won’t survive more than another day or so. The stuff we have in storage is getting riper every minute and at some point it will have to be disposed of,’ Brown said.”
Perhaps the tons of rotten tomatoes could be sold to irate Americans to throw at the incredibly lame political candidates, who have been upchucked by the two-party system for 2008.
The Reuters article notes “The FDA warned U.S. consumers on Saturday that the outbreak was linked to eating certain raw red plum, red Roma, and red round tomatoes, and products containing those tomatoes. Major restaurant and grocery chains stopped selling those varieties, and some stopped selling all raw tomatoes entirely…the FDA has said it does not know where the contaminated tomatoes originated. The infections have struck most often in New Mexico and Texas… The FDA said there had been 167 reported cases as of Tuesday, including at least 23 hospitalizations, related to the outbreak since mid-April. The infections were caused by Salmonella Saintpaul, an uncommon type of the bacteria. Salmonella bacteria are frequently responsible for food-borne illnesses. Symptoms generally appear within 12 to 72 hours after eating infected food and include fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain.”
These symptoms are so common after eating the local food in Mexico that they are referred to as Montezuma’s Revenge. When are we going to learn that dirty, filthy people from Central America who do not wash their hands spread disease? Louis Pasteur figured that out in the 1850s. Why can’t we seem to remember this?
One wonders what exactly was the final straw that has led to the continuing breakdown in sanitation in agriculture. Was it just an eventual outcome after using Mexican crop pickers for years? Have White supervisors been replaced with Latinos, who don’t enforce clean work habits? Have more civilized big city Mexicans been replaced in agriculture with Central American Indians from the jungles with no sense of hygiene?
We’ve seen spinach, scallions, lettuce, peanut butter and now tomatoes contaminated with either E-Coli or salmonella. What’s next? Grapes? Melons? Citrus fruits? Dysentery in the salad bar? Cholera in the frozen orange juice? Bubonic plague in the chicken? (America’s chicken processing plants are hygienic disasters waiting to happen.)
Why do we allow millions of filthy Third World people into our country and put them to work in (of all things): fruit picking, cooking and the fast food industry?