Difficult Tomato Trails

The subhead for a piece on the front page of the Business section of yesterday’s Chicago Tribune is unlikely to soothe anyone who’s already had their food-safety paranoia piqued in recent months and years: “Food safety czar David Acheson has led the effort to narrow the possible source of the salmonella outbreak, but he says discovering the bug’s origin may be impossible.” That last word’s a tough nut to crack. Impossible.

The issue boils down to traceability. Boxes of tomatoes, as the Trib article notes, are not required to carry any information regarding their origin, although some growers voluntarily label them. In the article, Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union (the folks who bring us Consumer Reports), suggests that the industry could benefit from more mandatory measures that would ensure full traceability to make microbial sleuthing easier when food-safety scares arise.

In a time when issues from farm to fork are increasingly top of mind for consumers and the industry as a whole, perhaps it’s time for such measures to hit the ground running.