pennie_dreadful | (no subject)

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Today an agent brought tomatoes from his garden, bread, and mayonaise and left them in the kitchen, so we've all been gorging ouselves on tomato sandwiches. And then someone brought a vidalia onion. Yum. :D

Tomatoes are hard to come by these days, since that salmonella scare. You can't get tomatoes on your sandwiches or in your salads at restaurants, and even in grocery stores, they're getting scarce. I keep thinking, okay, all you have to do is WASH them first and you won't get sick. And three seconds under the faucet isn't going to cut it, either. Bastards. The same thing happened to spinach last year, and now you can't find spinach salads anywhere.

And since I'm on the topic, I feel I have to point out that if we hadn't become so germ phobic in the first damn place, we wouldn't be as susceptible to food poisoning. We've been so crazy about disinfecting and sanitizing everything that now we have no immunity to anything anymore!

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I find it really weird that tomatoes could get salmonella. Is that cause they put fish genes in them or something? Even if it's not, I'm still very anti-GMO. We should not be messing with nature. Nature's better at it than we are.

Oh and I agree about the sanitising thing. Anti-bacterial soap doesn't just kill the bad stuff but the good stuff too. When I see those ads for sprays and shit to kill everything, I wince.

Edited 2008-06-18 18:08 (UTC)

I have no idea how that could happen either, unless the farmers were using manure that hadn't been properly treated or something? And anyway you're supposed to wash your produce before you eat it! You never know who's hands were all over it before you bought it.

I don't think manure would do it. I've eaten loads of veggies in my life that were (home)grown with manure, and I'm not the most thorough washer around. I don't wash mushrooms, for example, because the water spoils them. You could rub them a bit I guess, but frankly, cooking kills most things. O'course, you should be able to eat tomatoes raw/fresh and not worry about salmonella - and you say it was in spinach too? I was pretty sure it was a bacteria that only liked raw meat...

I think one of the theories as to how spinach got contaminated was that farmers were allowing their livestock to wander in the fields and their shit was what caused it all. Still that doesn't explain the tomatoes, since they don't grow on the ground.

You can wash muchrooms right before you eat them, it won't hurt them, but you definately don't want to put them away wet, unless you're trying to make homegrown penicillin. ;)

No tomatoes?! What kind of crazy world is this?
Are you in America? Or did I make that part up?
Should I ask another question, just so there's five?
:D

And then there's the anti-bacterial that doesn't really do anything at all. I must admit that it is nice to wash your hands and have them at least feel clean (even if it's in your head) - especially when I was at the hospital. Though that was industrial-strength stuff... Though that's not day-to-day stuff, really. But certainly working with bodily fluids means you're not scared of 'normal' germs anymore. /digression.

*points to profile yes* Yeah, I'm in America. And yeah, it's crazy that people are so freaked out by all this that restaurants are not serving tomatoes anymore. What's next I wonder? Spinach last year, tomatoes this year, broccoli next? Or squash?

*facepalms* Locations refuse to sink in, evidently.

Carrots next. Oh yes, they are bacteria farms :P

I just keep thinking all they had to do wash wash them first, and they wouldn't have gotten sick.

The traced the tainted tomatoes back to California and a few other places, so now everyone is blaming migrant workers from Mexico. Which is probably true sad to say, the farmers who hire them don't provide anything but a place to pitch a tent, no bathrooms or running water, so...if they had to go, they couldn't have washed their hands, and ta da, salmonella on the tomatoes. Although why it was only tomatoes..? More than likely we'll be hearing about more salmonella poisonings in the future.

That's sad that things spiral down to playing the blame game. If they worked on fixing the problem instead, they wouldn't have to.

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