Jun 10

Here we go again: tomatoes off menu

Sitting in the Forbes Avenue Subway in Oakland, Nathan Pancoast said his club sandwich lacked an essential ingredient.

“It’s so dry without the tomato,” the University of Pittsburgh student said. “It’s a completely different taste.”

Monday was a bad day to have a hankering for BLTs, salsa or anything else that includes raw tomatoes. Groceries, restaurants and food service companies pulled red round, plum and Roma tomatoes from shelves in response to a federal alert linking those tomatoes to a nationwide outbreak of salmonella.

“I’m asking, ‘How long is this going to go on?’” said Les Ainsman, owner of Coosemans Pittsburgh Inc., a produce seller in the Strip District. “Two days? Two months? It’s costing the industry millions.”

The Food and Drug Administration issued an alert for New Mexico and Texas on June 3 and expanded the warning nationwide on Saturday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked 145 cases of salmonella in 16 states to eating raw tomatoes.

No cases were reported in Pennsylvania, but elsewhere at least 23 people have been hospitalized. No deaths were reported. The cases were reported between April 17 and May 27.

Guillermo Cole, spokesman for the Allegheny County Health Department, said 21 cases of salmonella were reported in the county this year, but none was linked to tomatoes. The county typically experiences about 100 salmonella cases annually, he said. Westmoreland County, the region’s second largest county, does not have its own health department.

The FDA was trying to pinpoint the source of the tainted tomatoes. The agency started a Tomato Safety Initiative in 2007 because eating fresh and fresh-cut tomatoes was linked to 12 outbreaks of salmonella in the past decade. Most of the outbreaks were traced to Florida and the eastern shore of Virginia, according to the FDA.

There are several types of salmonella bacteria. The one linked to these cases, Saintpaul, is an uncommon one, according to the CDC.

The most common way for food to become infected is when it comes in contact with animal feces. The CDC recommends washing vegetables, hands and preparation surfaces as a way to limit the spread of salmonella, but washing alone doesn’t guarantee that salmonella is eliminated, said CDC spokeswoman Lola Russell. In a 2006 outbreak of E. coli linked to spinach, the bacteria was inside the spinach.

“No amount of washing was going to wash it away,” Russell said.

The bacteria can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections, particularly in young children, frail or elderly people and people with weakened immune systems. Most people infected with salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, nausea, vomiting and abdominal cramps within 12 to 72 hours. The illness usually lasts four to seven days.

Given the potential consequences, most restaurant owners said they really had no choice.

“We’re just not selling them until we get the OK from the produce companies,” said John DelPizzo of Del’s Bar and Ristorante DelPizzo in Bloomfield.

Fortunately for lovers of Italian food, most of the sauces are made from canned tomatoes harvested months ago, and the salads use grape tomatoes, which aren’t part of the alert. The main impact has been on the restaurant’s sandwiches, DelPizzo said.

That’s not the case for La Fiesta in Oakland. Owner Vincent Baldez said his cooks use fresh tomatoes in the preparation of every meal in his Mexican restaurant, so taking away tomatoes would take away his business.

“Nobody knows where the problem is,” he said. “If there was something wrong here, I’d stop using tomatoes. But the problem is, how can you tell what tomatoes are bad?”

That uncertainty has Strip District produce companies worried about a repeat of the 2003 Hepatitis A outbreak linked to green onions, which hurt business for months.

Brad Kokowski, the owner of Superior Produce, said the outbreak is going to take away 80 percent of his tomato business, or about 15 percent of his total revenue.

“This is crazy,” he said. “Until we get the OK (from the FDA), we’ll lose that much. And then, the business will trickle back slowly like with the green onions.”

Giant Eagle removed green, yellow and organic tomatoes from its shelves Sunday, in addition to the red tomatoes, because they were grown in the same general areas linked to the outbreaks, said company spokesman Victor Kimmel.

“We took the green and yellow tomatoes off the shelf as an added precaution,” he said.

Brooks Broadhurst, senior vice president of food and beverage for the Eat’nPark chain, said the company gets its tomatoes this time of year from Florida, so it had to remove all of those it uses for sandwiches and omelets.

“Even if we had tomatoes from California, we’d have to make a decision whether we want to serve them or not because of customer perception,” he said.