Terence Corcoran, editor of the Financial Post, writes that it started out as another killer tomato story — one Texas man dead from salmonella poisoning,
146 others suffering in 16 states — but now it’s turning into the killer of the tomato industry story. How did that happen?
The usual. It begins with a food poisoning, gets picked up by brain-dead media, story flies out of control for 48 hours, regulators swing into extreme self-preservation mode, risk-ignorant consumers 2,000 kilometres away get confused and panicky, and the food in question — a billion dollar industry — gets blown away.
The bare bones junk science sequence of this week’s tomato scare story couldn’t be more illustrative of our absurd inability to cope with what are really local and relatively minor commonplace events that involve risk that is minimal to non-existent. Food scare stories are also commonplace, and occur even though food risks are generally easily controlled, preventable and avoidable.
This latest runaway food panic is almost a parody of unlikely cause-and- effect. Man eats food in Mexican restaurant, gets food poisoning from tomato- based pico de gallo, shuts down continental tomato markets. If everyone who ever got food poisoning in a Mexican restaurant triggered a related industry crisis — I think I got mine from a guacamole dish — half the food industry would have been closed a decade ago.
Enhancing the media-led distortion is the fact that the original story is wrong:
The man allegedly killed by tomato salmonella after eating at a Houston, Texas, restaurant — 67-year-old Raul Rivera — actually did not die from the tomato he ate. Kathy Barton, a Houston health official, said Mr. Rivera’s official cause of death is cancer. The Texas health department reports it has no deaths from salmonella poisoning.
Mr. Rivera did pick up salmonella at the restaurant, as did other members of his family. But only he had to go to hospital. He died last Wednesday, about two weeks after eating the contaminated tomatoes.
As far as we know, the restaurant is still operating — even though the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta says that the vast majority of tomato- based salmonella poisonings occur in restaurants. Not that tomatoes are necessarily free of contamination when they arrive at the local deli, taco joint or fast-food outlet. Tomatoes can become tainted during growing, handling and processing —i.e., before they reach restaurants. But the CDC says restaurant handling practices are a likely cause of cross-contamination that exacerbates the risks.
Aside from Mr. Rivera, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that it has upward of 145 other reported cases of salmonella poisoning since mid-April, although only 23 required hospitalization. Since 1990, there have been about a dozen such small, localized outbreaks of salmonella involving 1,990 people.
That implies thousands more people infected who did not report to authorities.
So far, no deaths have been linked to the events.
So we are clearly not talking about a plague sweeping the United States. In fact, given the explosion in the volume of tomato consumption, the incidence of harm is trivial. Not that precautions (washing, cleaning, handling) or research into tomato-borne salmonella isn’t needed, but it is clear that the risks from tomato eating are nothing consumers should worry about.
But the usual extreme reaction to the non-death of Mr. Rivera, fueled by media-induced panic, is leading to the usual non-sensical results. Time to grow your own tomatoes, said one story. Buy only local produce, said another, playing off the buy-local fad.
Americans consume five billion pounds of tomatoes each year, produced by and imported from just about every state, province and major food-producing country. Per capita consumption has soared from 12 pounds to more than 20 pounds over the last 40 years, the growth driven by the changing cultural mix.
The rise of Latino populations in the South and West is a major source of rising demand for tomatoes.
Out of five billion pounds produced by thousands of growers and processed through maybe millions of restaurants, at worst only a few pounds in decades have produced real consumer harm. Even the CDC in Atlanta said in a report that the rise in the incidence of tomato-based salmonella may be due to the combined fact that there are more tomatoes on the market and that the reporting systems have been improved. “The average size of reported outbreaks (of food-borne infections) during 1998-2002 was smaller than the average size of outbreaks during 1993-1997, indicating that a substantial portion of the increase in reported outbreaks might be caused by smaller outbreaks that were not reported in previous years.”
The combination of increased reporting systems and the massive growth in the industry turned a minor salmonella problem into an industry crisis. The media has a great habit of creating a panic, and then reporting on the existence of the panic.
The U.S. tomato industry, a spectacular success story in terms of output and product popularity, is being hammered by familiar villains — a sloppy media, regulators who enhance the sense of confusion and junk science — our almost willfull ignorance of risk.
