The Tomato Pickle

And when produce is packed and shipped over long distances, there's more time for a bacterium like salmonella to colonize. Once the germs come in contact with a tomato, it takes about 90 minutes for them to attach themselves to the surface. Then, under suitable conditions, the colonies of microorganisms will eventually cover the surface of the tomato, says Kaletunc. If the tomato has any cuts or bruises, the salmonella can also grow inside the fruit, where it can survive even if the tomato is washed thoroughly.

Locavores insist that smaller farms have a safety advantage because they avoid the lengthy multistep packing and shipping process that is used by many corporate farms. "The produce is harvested by migrant workers, shipped to a processing facility, then a packaging facility, then a delivery truck and finally to a grocery store. There are just so many steps that contamination issues can and do occur," says Gary Cox, the legal council for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

Roberts counters that there's no real evidence that smaller farms are inherently more immune to contamination. "Regrettably, mistakes can happen along the line with any size farm. It's so difficult to have generalities, to say this is bad food and this is good food. The real key is for everyone to follow good safety practices."

But exactly what those practices should be and how they should be put in place is in question. On Thursday the General Accounting Office issued a report slamming the FDA for providing little guidance on how to fund or implement the food protection plan it introduced last November. The office also says the FDA has enacted only three of 24 GAO food safety recommendations. Lisa Shames, the GAO's director of natural resources and environment, said in testimony to a House subcommittee on Thursday that her agency had sounded the alarm about the FDA's problems in enforcing food safety in 1998. "A decade later," she said, "the story remains the same and has only taken on a greater sense of urgency."

Apart from the public health concerns, a produce outbreak can be devastating for agriculture-dependent states such as Florida, which produces an annual tomato crop valued at $500 million to $700 million and provides more than 90 percent of the nation's tomatoes at this time of year. The FDA said on Thursday that Florida was not a source of the outbreak, but the two-week period when some types of tomatoes could not be sold cost the industry millions in lost revenue.

In response to the loss, Florida officials have stepped in to create stricter measures on their own. Roberts says that the state has taken the lead nationwide by introducing the first mandatory produce safety regulations and record-keeping requirements on top of the more general federal guidelines, and that California growers are considering a similar move. The Florida regulations will be backed up by state inspections as of July 1. "With several outbreaks in 2004 and 2005, the industry in Florida said, 'We don't want to wait for someone else to craft something and have further outbreaks'," Roberts says.