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by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director<\/strong><\/p>\n I love tomatoes. Home grown, store bought, on the vine, off the vine, grape and cherry tomatoes, doesn\u2019t matter, I love them all. But over the past few months, as the Food and Drug Administration<\/a> suspected tomatoes as the source of a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,300 consumers in the United States and Canada, I\u2019ve begun to worry that tomatoes could go the way of the Edsel<\/a>. The industry has lost an estimated $250 million, with the fruit rotting on the vine. (Yes, tomatoes are a fruit!) You have to feel terrible for tomato producers as the FDA has struggled to pin down the source of the foodborne pathogen.<\/p>\n Tracing what fruit or vegetable is the source of an outbreak like salmonella, even with advances in technology, is still dependent on local health officials and a poor or nonexistent trace-back system. Some local health departments are better than others. In the case of tomatoes, in mid-May the FDA announced a Salmonella outbreak and focused on tomatoes alone, but it wasn\u2019t until July 9 that FDA\u2019s warnings were expanded to include jalape\u00f1os. A bioterrorism law passed in 2002 was supposed to set up systems to enable tracing back through the food supply to find the source of microbes like Salmonella. In this recent outbreak, however, investigators were rifling through paper invoices instead of computer records. The system is so laborious that many times investigators don\u2019t learn what made people sick, or by the time they do, the outbreak is over. Meanwhile, when tomatoes or peppers or other foods are implicated, consumers steer clear, restaurants steer clear, and the growers and everyone in the chain of production lose millions.<\/p>\n Trace-back systems with identifying information on each piece of produce would help solve this problem. I\u2019ve seen infrared technologies designed to do just that. The FDA says that three key components are needed for trace back systems to work: a unique identifier that follows each food item from field to consumer, electronic record keeping and a common framework for sharing information among all the players.<\/p>\n