Throw 'em out folks:
Thanks for posting this. I’ve already sent it my friends and family living in states affected.
Yeah… I don’t know why I said “all 50 states”. Corrected title.
Apparently Quebec and Ontario are included, but no one in Canada has yet been reported sick.
I have a white onion in the fridge of unknown provenance (it has no sticker on it – onions usually don’t) and I think I’m going to go ahead and use it. It was purchased loose, not in a labeled bag or carton, so it’s impossible to know where it came from, but the chances that it came through the US at all, let alone originating in Chihuahua, are pretty small.
Making a roast tonight, so I had to go shopping. I almost picked up a white onion, but I looked at it and some vague alarm bell went off in my head. Looks like we’re having dried, diced onions tonight. Thanks for the heads-up!
Won’t roasting the onions kill any salmonella? Chicken is often contaminated with salmonella too, but after you cook it it’s fine.
Just treat the cutting board and knife like you cut raw meat on them and you should be fine.
Good point.
Doing some more Googling, I see there was another onion-related salmonella scare back in August of last year, this one causing hundreds of Canadians getting sick due to onions from a source in Bakersfield, California. I wasn’t even aware of that one, and survived! The good news for those in Ontario and Quebec (currently the only places that might have some of the contaminated Chihuahua onions) is that, at least when it’s seasonal, most onions come from domestic crops.
This is what I was wondering. I use white and yellow onions all the time but I usually cook them in soups and stews and such. The only onions I typically eat raw are red onions and scallions.
The FDA’s food safety page on Salmonella says “Cook all food to the proper temperature”, with a link to safe cooking temps.
Since Salmonella is most often associated with chicken, and the safe temp for chicken is 165 degrees, I assume as long as your onions get to an internal temp of 165 degrees, you’re fine. They definitely will in a soup, which will be near boiling, or a roast that’s cooking a big chunk of meat, since they are smaller than the meat.
But an additional concern, as always with bacterial contamination, is not just the bacteria itself but the possibility that it may have produced toxins; a lot of food poisoning is not from bacteria but from the toxic byproducts. According to the paper below (Section 3.2, Toxins) salmonella can produce both exotoxins (toxins exuded into the material) and endotoxims (toxins internal to the bacteria itself).
Heat kills bacteria but can’t nullify toxins. Fresh chicken within its best-by date that may have salmonella can likely be rendered safe by proper cooking, but not necessarily stuff that’s been contaminated and hanging around too long.
I have no idea how relevant this is to onions, though.
Good point. All the info I can find on Salmonella largely refers to “infections”, so I assume that toxins are not the primary issue, but they may still be dangerous in some cases.
If large shipments of onions are Salmonella contaminated, it seems very likely to me that the contamination is largely on the outside, not like infecting the interior onion flesh itself (if salmonella could generally infect and grow in onions, we’d have bigger problems, so I still think it’s highly likely that treating onions like raw chicken for food prep (don’t reuse knives or cutting boards, wash your hands, cook it thoroughly) is going to be very low risk.
A big one that most people outside of the food-service industry aren’t going to think about is something stuffed inside something else. For example, if you have stuffing inside a turkey, in addition to making sure the turkey is fully cooked, you should also be temping the stuffing.
I was doing some errands tonight and considered grabbing a hot dog or maybe a couple tacos and remembered the recall. What are restaurants doing and when can it be considered all clear?
I believe the all clear has been given. The articles states it’s only onions from certain suppliers, in certain states and between certain dates. You can buy all the onions you want now.