Tomatoes and Salmonella

June 10, 2008 2:23 PM

Just sitting here a moment ago in my Brooklyn apartment my girlfriend said "We should throw away our tomatoes since they might have salmonella." How worried should we really be about this possibility? I just bought some tomatoes yesterday and I don't want to throw away perfectly good produce.
posted by josher71 to food & drink (14 comments total)

You can cook them fully. I understand the east coast is baking in some nasty heat, but you could certainly make a hot dish and be OK.
posted by Science! at 2:29 PM on June 10, 2008

Check that little sticker because the FDA says tomatoes grown in NY are safe.
posted by spec80 at 2:30 PM on June 10, 2008

It depends on where they're from. I can't tell if you know this already, but there was a huge recall announced a couple of days ago. Some states' tomatoes are said to be safe and others not so much.
posted by loiseau at 2:30 PM on June 10, 2008

From CNN

From the article:

The FDA still doesn’t know how tomatoes were tainted with salmonella. But they are telling consumers to avoid the following RAW tomotoes: Roma, Red Plum and Round Red tomatoes. However, these same tomatoes are ok, if they from certain states. You can find that list here.
posted by xotis at 2:31 PM on June 10, 2008

What type of tomatoes? From WaPo:

Tomatoes attached to the vine, cherry and grape tomatoes, and homegrown tomatoes are safe. So are tomatoes grown in Arkansas, California, Georgia, Hawaii, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Puerto Rico. The FDA also cleared tomatoes from Belgium, Canada, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Israel and Netherlands.

However, red roma, red round, and Red plum tomatoes from other states should get tossed.
posted by iminurmefi at 2:33 PM on June 10, 2008

Call your store and ask which state those particular tomatoes are from (they're supposed to know) and also if any of their produce was affected by the recall, had they, at the time you bought the tomatoes, already removed that product from the shelves. I work in a grocery store, and our recall notice came down, and was complied with, about the middle of the day yesterday.
posted by frobozz at 2:37 PM on June 10, 2008

Not worried at all.
posted by sanka at 2:46 PM on June 10, 2008

If in doubt, cook rather than toss. Pizza, spaghetti sauce, etc.
posted by zippy at 2:47 PM on June 10, 2008

They pick up salmonella during the picking and processing. There is a water-bath involved, and sometimes the water used isn't exactly clean. Certainly not after a million tomatoes and the requisite filth attached to them has gone through the water. Salmonella is fecally transmitted, so just imagine...

(Even if they are from a known good area, did they come into contact with others anywhere along the way?)

If that doesn't creep you out enough to throw them away, if you cook them well, they should be fine.
posted by gjc at 4:22 PM on June 10, 2008

tomato sauce
posted by caddis at 5:39 PM on June 10, 2008

Couldn't just wash them with antibacterial soap, or wipe them down with rubbing alcohol?

/completely ignorant
posted by GardenGal at 8:12 PM on June 10, 2008

so, if you have these tomatoes in your kitchen, don't think you can just wash them. the bug might be inside, we just don't know yet. cook them, it's a bug that hates heat.
posted by caddis at 9:13 PM on June 10, 2008

The last place I lived, all food was considered contaminated. So before eating anything, like a tomato or strawberries, we'd wash it in a disinfecting bath for 15 minutes. I used the iodine looking solution called "disinfectant for fruits and vegetables", and you could buy this in the supermarket because it was such a common problem. Not sure if you can buy something similar in NY supermarkets easily, but I'm sure you could find something similar in a camping store. Friends I knew (usually older women) used a small quantity of bleach (half a cap or something similar) in a couple of liters of water.

Anecdata - I once ate strawberries without disinfecting and had horrible salmonella poisoning that required hospitalization. I then asked around and found out that pretty much all strawberries there had salmonella. The next few times I ate them, they had been disinfected for 15 minutes in some kind of chemical water (sometimes made from bleach, sometimes this iodine solution), and no one in the group eating strawberries got sick.

Disclaimer - I am not recommending you drink bleach. But even if you think these have salmonella, they still might be okay to eat. Check out some websites with food safety tips for the third world. I'm sure they'll have a section on disinfecting and how you can best do it in your home.
posted by mosessis at 9:42 AM on June 11, 2008

There's this website, which is suggesting simply washing in purified water and, if you do use chemical disinfectants, only leaving it there for a minute or so. So if you go this route, I'd more research if you're freaked out by food safety. If you're not, though, I'd say wash 'em in a chlorine/water bath and enjoy.
posted by mosessis at 9:47 AM on June 11, 2008