FDA Warning: Dispose of All Doubtful Fruit

The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday advised Americans to be “safe rather than sorry” and toss out all fruit in their refrigerators unless they are certain it was not grown in Chile.

At the FDA’s urging, supermarkets in Southern California and across the nation acted quickly to remove all Chilean fruit products from their shelves. At thousands of grocery stores, grapes, plums, nectarines, peaches and raspberries were scooped off tables, loaded into cases and moved into back-room storage.

Around the world, government officials, retailers and shippers took drastic steps to cut off supplies of Chilean fruit, even though they acknowledged that there was little to indicate that a crisis was truly at hand.

Traces of Cyanide

The warning to avoid all Chilean fruits spread quickly after the FDA said Monday that it had found traces of cyanide in two seedless red grapes shipped from Chile into the port of Philadelphia. The FDA moved after a threat of product poisoning was telephoned to the U.S. Embassy in Chile.

On Tuesday, the FDA was still pondering how to proceed, and there was no word on what might become of the tons of produce piling up in warehouses, supermarket coolers and ports.

Agency investigators spent most of Tuesday inspecting cases of grapes in the ports of Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia but found no further evidence of contamination. However, FDA Commissioner Frank Young continued to urge that Chilean fruit not be consumed until a thorough investigation could be made.

Meanwhile, FBI agents in Philadelphia, invoking a 1983 federal law against product tampering, said Tuesday they were investigating the cyanide-tainted Chilean grapes.

The FBI’s investigation, which began Monday, is in its “initial stages” and will involve working with Chilean officials, an FBI official said. Agents will seek to determine the fruit’s point of origin and the identities of all persons who had contact with the poisoned fruit.

The ban on Chilean fruit spread rapidly around the world, with Japan, West Germany, Denmark and Hong Kong announcing that they also have closed their markets to Chile’s fruits. In Brussels, the European Community put all member countries on alert for Chilean fruit imports.

Security Tightened

In Chile, the government tightened security on the handling of fruit exports and began a criminal investigation into the cyanide-tainting of grapes exported to the United States.

Hoping to counteract any rising sentiment against Chilean products, the country’s minister of agriculture, Jaime de la Sotta, flew to Washington late Tuesday for meetings today with FDA officials about steps to make imports secure.

De la Sotta said investigators had identified the packing house and vineyard that was the source of the tainted grapes. He refused to identify them but said he knew who they were based on information provided by U.S. officials.

But the president of the Chilean fruit exporters, Enrique Bruzzone, said the grapes came from a vineyard and packing house owned by an established and respected grower, Julia Saavedra, in the Curacavi area, between Santiago and the coastal city of Valparaiso.

Chilean exporters immediately halted their shipments and returned fruit to producers, who stopped picking.

High Stakes

The stakes in defusing the effects of a ban are high for the South American nation, which is known for high-quality fruit. Spokesman William Grigg of the FDA said that last year, 863,900 pounds of Chilean fruits and vegetables, valued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at $323.9 million, were imported into this country.

“Chile has been on its way to becoming the world’s major supplier of fresh fruits and vegetables during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter months,” he said.

As they awaited further word from the FDA, Southland shoppers reacted with a mixture of calm and concern.

At the Vons on Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena, customers peered at a hand-lettered sign listing fruits--grapes, peaches, nectarines, plums and raspberries--that had been imported from Chile and that the store had removed from shelves.

“No pears on that?” wondered one reader.

“Strawberries aren’t on there, are they?” asked another.

“It takes all the pleasure out of eating,” said one woman, not breaking stride as she passed the produce area.

Shoppers with children seemed particularly alarmed.

“It makes you wonder, ‘What’s safe anymore?’ ” said Sheryl Mucci of San Marino. “Two grapes? That’s what started this? (But) you can’t pooh-pooh it and not be concerned.”

Loading bags into her station wagon down the street at Bristol Farms, Gail Katz said: “My daughter just heard it on the news and decided she wanted some grapes; there aren’t any. Isn’t it kind of ironic?”

Inside, a woman asked assistant produce manager Kim Schwarm if the fruit on display was safe. “Positively,” he said.

“Positively?” she repeated, before pushing her cart out of the produce area without loading any fruit into it.

Many Phone Calls

Schwarm said he has had “phone call after phone call” from people concerned with the safety of fruit.

Piloting his shopping cart past stacks of melons and piles of apples at the Ralphs at 3rd and La Brea, Norton Beckman said he probably would have purchased some grapes if they had been available.

He compared the Chilean fruit warnings with the recent flap over apples treated with the chemical Alar and other past scares involving everything from orange juice to Tylenol.

“If you took four tons of (any contaminated product), you’d get cancer,” he said.

Peter J. Sodini, president and chief executive of the 52-store Boys Markets chain, said he expected that cyanide concerns would cause some customers to shun all fruits temporarily.

Normal Reaction Seen

“It’s normal to assume that there’s probably a generic concern now about fruit,” he said. “Until the public gets fully informed over the next few days, I would think most people would be a little gun-shy.”

Noting that the Chilean fruit scare followed renewed controversy over the safety of apples, Sodini mused: “Not a good two weeks for produce.”

Executives at many Southland food chains complained that the FDA did not issue any formal advice about what to do with Chilean produce until Tuesday morning. Many of the chains had begun removing products Monday afternoon after getting calls about the cyanide poisoning from newspaper and television reporters. Most grocers on Tuesday told customers that they would make refunds on any returned fruit purchases.

When asked how long the Chilean produce would last in storage at Ralphs Grocery’s 135 stores, Kerry Hodges, vice president of produce for the Compton-based chain, said: “We wouldn’t want to hold them more than a few days. We need to know what to do before too much longer.”

An executive for a Delano, Calif., import-export firm called the ban “devastating” to the fresh produce industry. “We’re in damage control right now,” said Darrel Fulmer, vice president-marketing for Pandol Bros. “It’s devastating to the industry. We’re very concerned that terrorism has found food as a forum to get their views out.”

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said President Bush was “greatly concerned” about the controversy.

“It’s a question of staying with the monitoring and trying to check out the system to evaluate the risk on a continuing basis and keep the public informed as we go along,” he told reporters.

He said the United States and Chile “are actively involved in assessing the situation and trying to discover if there’s any broader contamination.”

“We’ll work as fast as we can with the countries involved to assess the risk situation,” he said.

Another White House official, meanwhile, said the President had not become involved in the issue on Tuesday.

A State Department official said Tuesday that the department’s role has been to facilitate communications among Chilean authorities and fruit exporters and the U.S. Customs Service and the FDA.

“Our role has been to keep the Chileans informed as to what is happening on the ground in Philadelphia and to make certain they understand that U.S. authorities are not applying any standard different from the standard that would be applied if this had been a case of tampering with an American domestic agricultural product,” he said.

“This is obviously very important,” he added. “We don’t want the Chileans to believe or think for some reason that we are discriminating against their agricultural exports.”

He said that the Chileans “across the board have been extremely cooperative and sensitive to the nature of the problem here.”

Cases Inspected

By late Tuesday morning, FDA officials had visually inspected 6,859 cases of grapes in the ports of Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia, a small portion of the 335,000 cases that are on hold in those ports or have been removed from the nation’s grocery shelves.

Thus far, FDA spokesman Grigg said: “Nothing has been found.”

Contributing to this story were staff writers Michael J. Ybarra and Bruce Keppel in Los Angeles and Marlene Cimons and James Gerstenzang in Washington.