Tomato scare in the U.S.

Great Debates
1

The topic that prompted the creation of this topic is the recent tomato scare in the USA. There was recently a nationwide scare about salmonella contaminated tomatoes. However, the FDA is still reporting that they cannot figure out where or how the contamination happened. There have been several of these scares over the past few years. Various veggies being contaminated with various diseases. Last year it was spinach, also contaminated with salmonella.

When you think about it, salmonella is only found abundantly in a few places. Mainly raw animal products, and… animal waste. So, how is this getting on our food that is coming out of the ground? Answer, we are putting it there. Not only that, but we pay more to put it there. The problem is coming from crops being fertilized with manure.

There are two main ways that crops are fertilized. The first is with manufactured chemical fertilizer, the other is with “natural” animal feces. The difference between these two is that chemical fertilizer is tested, thoroughly. Chemical fertilizer is produced mainly in 35lb bags (last I checked) with about 50 bags to a pallet. Every pallet of chemical fertilizer is tested, every single one. They are all FDA tested for diseases and chemical composition and potency. This allows for a supremely consistent and safe product. Fecal fertilizer on the other hand, is not tested. There is no FDA regulation of manure fertilizer. Even though, this animal waste could possibly contain a variety of diseases. And it’s all up to the farmer as to which kind of fertilizer to use. So, like any businessman, a farmer must choose the best product for the price, and what he/she can sell it for. Well, the difference in the price is not very much. Not enough for a farmer to risk the lives of the people consuming his crop. However, on the sales end, the crops sprayed and grown with the animal raw fecal fertilizer sell for a considerably higher price. Yeah, much higher. In fact, from what I understand it’s the “cool” and “in” thing to do right now.

Consumers, for some reason, are leaning away from crops sprayed with chemicals, and towards crops sprayed with disease-ridden animal waste. They most often have a specific label on them, and as stated sell for a much higher price. You may know them as “organically grown” goods. This “organic” label means a few different things. The first is that the farmer is growing the crops using unregulated and potentially lethal methods. The second is that these goods are not grown using “dangerous” (though thoroughly tested by the FDA) chemicals. And the third is that these goods are supposedly “healthier” because of this. Oh, not to mention, the price tag right below the label may be 50% or more higher than the non-organic brand.

So why is the FDA saying that they cannot find the source of the salmonella outbreak? The first is that the FDA is not testing these crops. They are not monitoring the conditions in which these crops were grown. So obviously they shouldn’t point the finger at their own fallacy. The second is a little more complicated. I have consulted a few farmers on this issue, and they all agree with me. But they always bring up the same point. Which is that the FDA cannot say anything about it. Otherwise many farmers, let alone the entire “organic goods” industry, would take a severe and possibly unrecoverable beating from a public strike against them. If people knew that they were putting their lives (and wallets) at risk for a label, then people would not buy these products anymore. It’s logical, and understandable, but seriously. Is there any difference between that and the tobacco industry? So yeah, I’ve been buying tomatoes throughout this entire scare. But always, with every crop I buy, request the non-organically grown goods, and I recommend you all do the same.

2

And so it begins again.

3

Erm, not necessarily. Animal manure fertilizer is not the only place that salmonella bacteria come from: they are also spread by food handlers who themselves are suffering from salmonellosis. They have the bacteria on their hands, they touch the peppers or tomatoes, the bacteria get on the veg, and the customer gets the bacteria. No animal manure fertilizer is required.

Cite.
http://www.health.state.ny.us/diseases/communicable/salmonellosis/fact_sheet.htm

4

Another difference is that animal feces are a renewable resource of practically unlimited supply, whereas chemical fertilizers are mostly . . . petroleum-based. We’ll have to learn to do without the latter before too long.

5 
I'm not a farmer but am a gardener surrounded by farmers. Manure is typically applied to earth in early spring or late fall and winter. Excess can be a compost feedstock.

Never heard of spraying with raw manure, disease-ridden or no. In fact that’s counter to everything I know of agriculture in the U.S.A. Spraying growing plants with raw manure likely leads to crop failure and inhibits pollination.
I’d be happy to read some data supporting your claim.

6

I feel like the era of increased capability of disease forensics is actually doing us a disservice. According to the CDC, 1220 people have become ill from the same salmonella genetic footprint. From the article,

So maybe two elderly sickly people died (possibly indirectly) from this outbreak? The article also states that the largest group of people infected at the same event was 5 persons.

I’m wondering if we as a nation have become somehow fascinated with a Platonic ideal of food supplies being completely safe. This is patently impossible. How much did this outbreak actually cost in terms of medical care? This article claims it cost $770,000 per patient. Certainly, it can’t have cost that much on a per patient basis, right? Is the disease really that bad that it costs close to a million dollars per patient to treat it? Or are they merely talking about $100 million in destroyed product and/or the cost of the CDC investigation?

Millions of people have died over the ages due to contaminated food. Babies, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems are most susceptible to death by salmonella. I’m willing to bet that a lot of cases were just dismissed as “A bad case of the runs” and therefore were never diagnosed and included in statistics. I’m convinced that I’ve consumed salmonella bacteria and never have gotten severely or even moderately ill. I do everything wrong. I eat raw eggs, and use the exact same cutting board for chicken, pork and vegetables (this is not sensible, but I’ve done it my entire life and I’m not dead, YET!). I will eat at damn near any third world food stall you can toss at me. You can laugh at me when I die of food poisoning, but it seems to me that we should look at these food contamination problems as a cost benefit analysis and only destroy huge amounts food when there is a clear threat to a significant number of healthy people. Perhaps we could put up a sign. "In the past two months. 0.002% of tomato consumers have contracted salmonella and 0.00002% may have died from contaminated tomatoes, which are now 50% off. I’ll take that chance and have been happily consuming cheap Mexican tomatoes during the entire crisis. I am switching over to farmer’s market tomatoes because they have hit the appropriate cost/benefit ratio. According to this article the death rate is 0.6%. I guess this is bad, but to me, it doesn’t really seem like it was really that bad, only that our identification technology is at its all time high and will only get better. I dunno, a couple of old farts dying is not really a crisis in my own mind.

I apologize if my quick research on the salmonella epidemic is grossly incorrect, but to me, it seems like we should be worrying about much larger problems. Does the USA use gamma ray irradiation for food sterilization?

7

Yes.

http://www.fda.gov/opacom/catalog/irradbro.html

Extensive overview here.

8

What, do you work for a chemical fertilizer company or something, TazMan? :wink:

I don’t know why people get so scared about stuff like this. Darryl Lict worked out the statistics and it is not really a big deal. Then again, I eat raw eggs and meat, so I might have a bias.

9

So the nationwide scare is being caused by thousands of diseased farmhands? There is certainly not one facility (Let alone hundreds of them) that employs a fully diseased staff causing the spread of this problem. This theory could hold true to a few veggies for one day, before the food handler gets too sick and begins vomiting on the produce he is handling… (sorry if too graphic) But it’s not feasible for this example to cause a widespread problem beyond a local community’s farmers market. The small amount of product would be caught and handled before distribution.

Please forgive me if I am mistaken, but I don’t think they use petroleum in many fertilizers, let alone base the components in it. Because just off the top of my head, I’m pretty sure that combination makes a great napalm. Let that tractor backfire one time… Not to mention, if they were petroleum based, then the fertilizer would be incredibly water resistant and possibly more resistant to runoff than organic fertilizer.

Raw manure is fertilizer, it does not lead to crop failure, it leads to crop enhancement. Though farmers will sometimes spray a chemical fertilizer mixed or along with with pesticides on growing crops, I don’t know if they do that with manure also. So I’ll admit that I may have exaggerated the “spraying crops” line, but still the problem is the same. The soil is treated with diseased manure right before plantation. The warm moist ground incubates the bacteria as the crops grow in it. The crops grow up and out and coated with a tasty little present. Obviously slinging clumps of manure onto buds could inhibit pollination for physical reasons, but the presence of the disease does not effect pollination if the disease does not effect the insect population.

The irradiation topic is irrelevant. If the infected crops were being irradiated, then there would not be a salmonella problem. So I think it is safe to assume that this process has not been used, or has at least not been effective, on the diseased produce. Though I certainly support its use, hopefully it becomes a requirement in all produce someday soon.

10

Chemical fertilizer is made by the Haber process.

And you are right about the explosive results that can happen from fertilizer. Prime example is the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.

11

Of course they don’t. While the issue you’re raising is not without some merit, you seem to be largely ignorant of what’s actually going on in the fields. Nobody’s going to spray manure directly onto growing crops because it would kill the crops, just as pissing in your flowerbeds will do bad things to the flowers. Most manure can’t be sprayed anyways, as it’s generally mostly in solid form (the huge exception here being intensive hog operations that use liquid lagoons). It’s also usually rather old and decayed before it gets spread. We’re not talking about anything like raw sewage here, though of course it fermenting shit is a lovely home for many bacteria.

So, out of curiosity, if we’re not going to spread manure onto fields, what do you suggest we do with it?

12

There are a fair number of mechanised farmers who prefer having the manure in liquid form; dairymen can wash down after milking, the resulting slurry gravity flows to a lagoon or more often DER approved tankage. Those with sufficient horsepower tractors inject it via ripper, tank and pump. Most neighbors approve the method.

13

For the luvva pete: Wash the tomato before you eat it. Wash any food that’s to be eaten raw. This is kindergarten stuff.

And, as a farmer for over 40 years, I can say I never heard of anyone spraying manure in any form on any food crop.

14

TazMan, modern synthetic fertilisers are directly tied to petrochem. Costs have doubled for urea from last year at this time.
Animal dung is not a good fertiliser in developed Nitrogen per acre by weight or volume applied compared to the synthetics.The Haber process is much of the reason that crop yields have essentially doubled in one generation. Dung is a soil amendment, but I know of no one who plants into fresh manure.
Do you have any cites for your claims of " The warm moist ground incubates the bacteria as the crops grow in it. The crops grow up and out and coated with a tasty little present."?

15

You’re probably thinking of ANFO, or Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. It’s a tertiary explosive, which means you need both a detonator (primary) and a booster (secondary) explosive for a reliable detonation. It’s also not going to have much brisance (think acceleration) if it’s not confined. Napalm, on the other hand, gets its name from “coprecipated aluminum salts of NAphthenic and PALMitic acids”. Naphthenic acid comes from crude oil. It’s also not an explosive, and doesn’t even deflegrate. It’s used because it both burns and sticks.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but ammonium nitrate is one of the most common fertilizers used on large farms.

Ammonium nitrate - Wikipedia

Although nitric acid isn’t a petroleum product, ammonia is synthesized from methane, propane, or butane. While we can get methane from other sources, propane and butane are most certainly petroleum products. Just because it’s derived from petroleum doesn’t mean the product can’t be water soluble.

16

It only takes one sick farm worker spending 8 hours in a single day picking produce all day, which amounts to hundreds of pieces of veg ( if not thousands in the case of small fruits) touched by his (or her) germ-laden hands.

Which are then shipped all across the United States, making it very difficult to pin down exactly where the sick guy was.

And some produce is grown and picked in Mexico and other Latin American countries, making it even harder to figure out where the veg got contaminated.

And it only takes one case of salmonella to make a media scare.

17

If you remember, the problem with spinach was traced back to one field. (And it was not a manure issue.) The issue here is that there is not traceability for tomatoes, so they can’t tell where the problem tomatoes came from. I work on this for electronics, and have looked at it for food (because they do a better job.) The bar code on a bottle of wine lets you trace the contents back to a few square meters of the vineyard the grapes came from. I’ve read that there is some action underway to tag tomatoes also, which will allow a much speedier resolution of the problem.

18

If only they could grow veggies with barcodes on them, that would do the trick.

19

My BIL is a winemaker and this certainly isn’t true for any winery I’ve seen. Most wines come from blends of grapes grown in a variety of places. There’s no way to trace things back to a patch of ground. By the time you get to bottling you have little idea where the fruit came from.

20

Here you go. Laser tagged vegetables.