Argh!!!! Now we’re told that Basha’s, AJ’s, and Food City have removed all tomatoes from all their stores. Why? Because two people in Maricopa County have fallen ill from eating tomatoes with germs on them.

AJ’s is the only store in town that carries edible tomatoes. Every other store, Whole Paycheck included, sells cardboard and styrofoam imitation tomatoes, those fine hard balls that hold up well in transport and when gassed while green will turn bright red, faking out the consumer once again.

Look. I know salmonella will make you sick, and I appreciate that a retailer (under threat of potential lawsuits) is concerned enough to take potentially contaminated produce off its counters. But there’s an easy fix for this, something we all should be doing as a matter of course: WASH YOUR PRODUCE BEFORE YOU EAT IT!

Contaminated and impure processed foods pose a real problem and certainly should be removed from commerce as soon as they’re identified. That’s because the contaminants are mixed in and packaged with the product, so there’s no way for a consumer to get them out of a canned, bottled, or prepared food. Also, it’s reasonable to expect that something in a can, a bottle, or a package is clean and safe to eat.

Not so with produce. Folks. Tomatoes do not grow in sterile rooms. Neither do lettuce, strawberries, blueberries, apples, oranges, asparagus, potatoes, carrots, radishes, parsley, sage, rosemary, or thyme…. They grow in dirt. Dirt is called “dirt” because it’s dirty. If you eat a tomato (or anything else that grows on a farm) without washing it, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get sick.

Personally, I resent being treated like a child. Too much of America’s package designs and marketing policies treat consumers like they were children, and not too bright children at that. I’m tired of wrestling with child-proof caps-and then leaving cleansers and OTC medicaments uncapped or transferring them into other packages-and I’m tired of having to dig out a knife to peel off inner labels intended to keep maniacs from dripping a little strychnine into the cough medicine. Please. Let me take my chances. If I’m too dumb to put dangerous products out of my kids’ reach, maybe the collective gene pool would be better off without my offspring. If I’m the one-in-87-billion who happens to pick up a product contaminated by a lunatic, I won’t be happy, but let’s get real: I’m a lot more likely to be hit by a car as I cross the street outside my office than I am to swallow strychnine in my cough syrup. And take a chance, dear Leaders and Giants of Commerce, that I’ll have enough sense to wash my produce before I gulp it down.

Yes, dear readers. Wash all raw food before you eat it. Wash it even if you’re going to cook it. A few years ago, Consumer Reports published an article saying that when you wash most nonorganic produce, you remove almost all the pesticide and fertilizer residues. This rule is especially important in our splendid era of globalization, when so much of our produce comes from countries that have no rules governing the safe use of pesticides on farms, and where fields may be fertilized with substances that Americans would rather not think about.

Here’s how to do it:

Clean the kitchen sink. Fill it with water and add just a few drops (doesn’t have to be much) of dish detergent. Place the produce into the water and let it sit for a couple of minutes. Agitate the produce around gently. Then drain the sink and rinse each piece well.

With lettuce: break the head of lettuce into individual leaves and wash them, as above, in a sink of weak detergent water. Rinse well and allow the leaves to drain in your dish drainer. Then lay the leaves out on a clean kitchen towel, roll up the towel with the leaves inside, and place the roll inside a plastic bag to refrigerate. This will keep the lettuce fresh for a long time, and your salad is half-made when you’re ready to eat it. Avoid precut packaged lettuce: it costs too much and it’s too difficult to wash.

If contamination on the outside of fresh produce is a serious problem, do what we did when I was growing up in Saudi Arabia: fill a sink with weak detergent water and add a quarter-cup of Clorox. Alternatively, add several camper’s iodine tablets, made for decontaminating river and stream water. Place the produce in the treated water and soak for 15 minutes. Rinse well. Lettuce treated with Clorox must be eaten promptly, as the chlorine will cause it to wilt after you store it. Also, this method does not work on strawberries.

Or, with produce that has a rind, peel, or skin (such as oranges, apples, and tomatoes), wash it under running water using plain old bar soap.

None of this is very hard to comprehend or to do.

4 Comments left on iWeb site

!wanda

With the California spinach scare last year, the problem (as explained by the media) was that the bacteria wasn’t merely on the surface of the plant.The spinach had taken it up through the roots, so the bacteria was inside the leaves, and no amount of washing would get rid of it.Cooking would probably destroy it, but apparently you can’t trust people to cook spinach.Is that what is happening with these tomatoes?

Wednesday, June 4, 2008 – 11:29 AM

vh

N-n-n-o-o. Salmonella cannot get INSIDE the leaves of anything. The little fellas can’t get inside a tomato. They’re on the surface.

Ah, yes. The Great Spinach Scare. The little guys got on the spinach when the fields were irrigated with water contaminated with the…uhm, offal, shall we say politely…from a cattle feedlot, one of the filthiest environments this side of a commercial henhouse. Depending on the part of the country where the farm is located, a field can be flood-irrigated or irrigated by sprinklers. We used to irrigate our fields with mobile sprinklers that connected to untreated water piped in from the Hassayampa River. Whatever li’l critters were living in the river water (interesting, some of ’em, such as, oh, say, giardia) would be sprayed all over the crops.

Yesh. That meant the crops had, oh, say, giardia on them, so if you were to trot out there and pick off a piece of freshly watered greens, you would get very very sick, indeed.

Giardia is as nothing compared to the sewage dumped into the water from a feedlot.

Trust me. Wash your produce. Then stop worrying about it. I know whereof I speak.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008 – 03:27 PM

ih

i’ve got some tomatoes in the backyard, a few are just ripening now.feel free to come over and pick some if you’d like.

Thursday, June 5, 2008 – 07:13 PM

vh

M’hijito! Remember to eat those oranges on your tree! The ones that have survived in the shade of your house are very sweet and juicy.

Thursday, June 5, 2008 – 08:03 PM