"I'm sorry. We can't make the capellini pomodoro because we don't have any fresh tomatoes."
I was in the Olive Garden, a place where I hadn't been in years. My friend asked the very good question, "But all of your other tomato dishes, what do you do for those dishes?" Our waiter explained that everything else was made from canned tomatoes.
What little heart I had in being there was crushed. The lack of tomatoes was blamed on the recent salmonella breakout. But I couldn't take it, and we left.
I'm certainly not saying the restaurant should have served me salmonella, but I figure I might have received fresh tomatoes in a non-chain situation. If large chains can't trust a situation, they will bail. It's the same reason why Applebee's won't cook a burger medium rare. The day after that fiasco, McDonald's announces the chain is pulling tomatoes from its stores. Taco Bell, Wendy's, and Burger King have taken action as well.
But the main issue is why tomatoes have salmonella or why spinach did have e-coli. Regardless of your political beliefs, our food supply, especially our fruit and vegetables, needs to be safe and protected.
It's funny how the chemicals, hormones, and high-fructose corn syrup that invade our food never gets e-coli or salmonella, but the actual food, the real food gets these dangerous diseases.
We have a Food and Drug Administration. We have a U.S. Department of Agriculture. Why can't we make this work?
If our factory farms are too large, if we don't have enough inspectors, if manufacturing companies are suffering from ethics issues, then let's fix the problem.
According to the Houston Chronicle, "the FDA, which regulates 80 percent of the food supply, gets only about 24 percent of available funds." The USDA "gets most of the food safety dollars, regulates only about 20 percent of the food supply, notably meat, poultry and eggs."
But even then, this is only part of the problem. The spinach was getting e-coli due to runoff from factory farms. Those who manage the food supply need to have better self-control, even if it dips into their good-sized profits.
It's bad enough that food that is bad for you is easy to get, while food that is good for you is harder to get. Then we have to make it harder to eat without getting sick. We need to live in a society where spinach and tomatoes are sought after by people of all ages to improve their nutrition, not be feared by eager consumers.
So whoever takes over as president in 2009, please do something about increasing the safety of our food supply. There will be lots of backlash from certain industries; the status quo likes things the way they are. But we need a better system, a way where safety and commerce can co-exist. And fruits and vegetables can reign supreme in our diets.
Roma tomatoes that the FDA currently says don't eat, unless they are from certain states.
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