Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Scary Foods

So, as you may have guessed from this blog, I love food. Especially, homemade, fresh foods. But, I just have to ask, what is going on with all the contaminations of fresh vegetables? Of course, I'm talking about the tomato scare that's going on right now and the spinach fiasco from last year. It breaks my heart, especially the tomatoes, my favorite of all the veggies--although technically it's a fruit. If it smells like a vegetable, tastes like a vegetable, and is grown from a plant, it's a vegetable in my book. But, I digress.

Vegetables are supposed to be a symbol of all that is healthy eating, a beacon of hope in the grocery store filled with sugary this and fat-laced that. In the last few years, we've seen huge beef recalls, E. coli infested spinach, and now tomatoes with salmonella. When will it end? Unfortunately, we don't have a yard to grow our own food in, and even if we did, my thumb is black as midnight--My Sweet Husband does all the plant-tending around here. Luckily, my favorite indulgence, the cherry tomatoes, have been spared, but how is a girl supposed to make a decent salad without tomatoes, and how is MSH supposed to enjoy his shrimp burritos without pico? The tomatoes growing on our balcony have started fruiting (is that the word?), but the tomatoes are still tiny and green and probably unfit for human consumption. So until this is all sorted out, I'm going to be encouraging our cherry tomatoes to act like big tomatoes and hoping that our tomato plants are bountiful and quick.

2 comments:

Alice said...

We love our tomatoes too. I've just been washing them really well before hand and no diarrhea yet!

anke-art said...

Oh, I'm sorry to hear about that. Salmonellas in tomatoes? That sounds like horror to me - I'm addicted to anything tomato...
Here in Germany, we had lots of food scandals during the past years, mainly concerning meat products. Have you heard about the movie "We feed the world"? That's really interesting and shows where most of the tomatoes are grown: here's a trailer