Fear of tomatoes

Andrew C. von Eschenbach, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, visited the editorial board Wednesday. The FDA is facing an outbreak of salmonella in tomatoes and attempting to upgrade its processes to deal with the changing food market. Here are some highlights.

Tomato contamination

Karin Klein: In terms of food safety, it’s not that we’re having more contaminations, but that those contaminations have a more expansive quality, because the producers are fewer but larger, they ship all over the place, and so things that tended to be local now tend to be national if not global. How is the FDA is addressing this?

Jerry Hirsch: And let me just add something. Since 1990 there have been 13 outbreaks of salmonella with tainted tomatoes. Why is it that we’re reliving this for the 13th time?

Andrew C. von Eschenbach: Because I don’t think we’ve done the job yet. We may be facing it for the 13th time and we may have begun to address it early in the ‘90s. But I don’t think we’ve reached the point where we’ve put all the parts and pieces in place that are necessary to bring this closer to a zero-defects problem. Let me explain that:

The first part is what needs to be done at the front end of production that’s going to reduce or eliminate the risk? I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where we totally eliminate the risk. Anything that comes out of the dirt is going to have the potential for contamination — whether through the irrigation water or birds or wild animals. That’s just the nature of it.

But having said that, we need to be developing science-based, risk-based good agricultural practices that will mitigate much of that risk. And the science of safety in fresh fruit and produce is not as mature as the science in the animal industry. We know certain bacteria have a propensity for certain kinds of fruit. We need to understand that and attempt to mitigate that. That’s a work in progress.

The other thing we have to do is this. On one end we have an illness in a patient that we define as salmonella. And we then have to go from an illness to understanding that that’s an actual outbreak, by applying science. But then you have to track back through a very complex supply chain, as you described, and a supply change that is not based on modern track-and-trace technologies. So you can see a tomato in a store that will have a little label on it that’s basically there for pricing. But we haven’t yet moved from that labeling to using those labels or bar codes technologies like RFID for tracking, so that you can go from that tomato in somebody’s refrigerator, back to the store where they purchased it, and from that point rapidly back to the field it came from.

Country of origin labeling

Karin Klein: Where are we on country of origin labeling?

Andrew C. von Eschenbach: We’re not where we need to be. Congress can legislate the statute, but the implementation is going to require us to come at the problem from multiple angles. Can you create the label so that it is meaningful as it relates to downstream utilization? What technologies make the most sense? What kind of labeling are you going to use? So we’re going to approach it not just to have the authority but to have the right approach to make it work effectively.

Freshness and packaging

Andrew C. von Eschenbach: We go home each night, stop at the supermarket and pick up a bag, go home, turn it upside down and out drops the lettuce, the croutons and the salad dressing, fresh. That process, rather than dealing with a head of lettuce, has dramatically changed the risks of microbial contamination, because you start chopping and mixing, etc. We want cantaloupe 365 days. Well they don’t grow in this country 365 days a year. They have to come from another country; so how do you do that with regard to shelf life? The cantaloupe gets taken off a hot field and immediately dropped into a chiller. The chiller’s got water in it. Say you’ve got dirt or bacterial contamination in the water. If you rapidly change the temperature of the cantaloupe, if there’s a little defect in the rind, that accentuates that contamination. You get that cantaloupe home, you can wash it, peel it, doesn’t matter: It’s contaminated and you’re going to get sick. Just the fact of how we process that cantaloupe changes the risk.

So we’ve got to keep pace with those changes in the process and in the market. It requires a different level of science and a different kind of intervention and different ways of managing.

Inspections and other tools for food safety

Andrew C. von Eschenbach: We can’t assume that just because we do more inspections we will solve the problem.

Karin Klein: No, but I don’t think totally enlightened self-interest has solved the problem either. A few years ago, when people thought If we had more unannounced on-site inspections, where producers feel there’s an objective party who is going to inspect their processes, and they never know when they might be doing it — hell, that’s the only reason I don’t speed, because I think there’s a good change I might get caught.

Andrew C. von Eschenbach: I’m just putting these things on the table and hoping you’ll see them as parts and pieces of a lot of things that need to be done, including enhancing our inspections, including many of the authorities that we’ve asked for. For example, if we are thwarted or preventing from doing our inspection, that we will have the legal authority to prevent that product from coming into the country, with no other need to prove adulteration. That’s one of the authorities I’ve asked Congress for, and I hope they’ll act on it...

We need to modernize our laboratories in the field. They need faster throughput and more modern equipment. They also need to be used as a network, just as our forensic laboratory has people who are uniquely expert. We need better technology for dealing with counterfeits. And we need the kind of technology to do rapid inspection.