There’s a recent recall of tomatos and I thought people would typicallu be at risk if they dont wash their food before consuming it. Could the bacteria be inside the food?
There’s a recent recall of tomatos and I thought people would typicallu be at risk if they dont wash their food before consuming it. Could the bacteria be inside the food?
Comments
No. The infection happens during packing/repacking by folks who were earlier handling contaminated foods
Yes, that can happen if irrigation water is contaminated. Lettuce and other leafy greens are more commonly affected this way, but I see no reason why tomatoes wouldn’t also be susceptible.
It’s kind of gross but quite often, contamination occurs when manure used in the fields is cross contaminated by workers when they process the tomatoes.
Also it’s possible for seeds to be contaminated with salmonella before planting.
Everyone has a good answer to this, but there’s also the occasional issue with wildlife defecating in the farming area, followed by poor handling and sanitation when the tomatoes are distributed.
Basically the tomatoes have poop water on them from farm animals
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Another thing that others haven’t brought up yet is that farm workers are often pushed to extreme work speeds and appropriate toilet facilities either not provided and/or they’re punished for taking breaks so farm workers often end up doing their business in the fields and this can introduce lots of bacteria onto the surface of the food.
Also washing your food can lower the risk but
Because the water being used is contaminated with it. This happens because mass meat producing factories sometimes have their waste water cross contaminate local streams and rivers which further down are being used to irrigate fruits and vegetables. The contaminated water gets absorbed by the fruits and vegetables through their root system and surfaces when being sprayed with it. This is why even washing the tomatoes won’t get rid of it as it’s in them.
Many of the bacteria that will make is such are effectively meaningless to other organisms.
One of the reason we have to be extra careful cooking chicken is that salmonella just doesn’t bother them much. So if they get salmonella in their system it can invade the actual meat. The chicken it’s not made ill at all. Because the bacteria doesn’t really grow much. It just sort of chills out in small quantities. But if we then eat the meat and it’s not thoroughly cooked it enters the alternate environment of our body where our body temperature is more conducive to the bacterial growth and it blooms and we become ill.
Plants that grow in contaminated conditions, for instance human waste, can pick up the bacteria from those conditions and transport it to their system. The plant can be absolutely suffused with small quantities of the relevant bacteria. Did you eat it and it goes from the relative lead useless to the bacteria conditions of the plant and enters the ideal conditions of your body where it’s in begins to grow at a great rate and in dangerous your health.
I have a septic tank that means that every drop of water I use ends up watering a section of my yard.
Everything grows very aggressively in that section of my yard because all year there is water available the soil. So anything that has a decent root Gap like most grasses in the blackberry bushes that plague my yard grow particularly well right over the drain field because of the printable water and nutrients.
It would be inherently the unsafe for me to eat any food that grew in that area of my yard. It’s not that every plant for necessarily any plant would certainly be infected but every fruit of every plant easily could be infected by whatever was in my human waste.
Now all over the world people do use Cuban waste as fertilizer but that is because over the centuries they have learned how to pretreat the waste. In fact a lot of fertilizer is made out of the productions of some water treatment plants if we local city isn’t also plagued with chemical pollutants that can’t be separated.
The number one way to turn sewage into fertilizer is to dry it out and subject it to significant amounts of heat. Basically he pasteurized the poop or bake the poop until it is safe and then grind up the resulting material into a powder etc.
Similarly spreading the fluent from a wastewater pond onto fallow land where in letting it bake in the Sun for days or even months can be effective.
But yeah, just plain old growing plants in unsafe environmental conditions can produce inherently unsafe food.
Now most of the time when we have like an e coli outbreak with lettuce it’s because like deer will have it invaded the lettuce fields and literally pooped right on top of the lettuce and then the lettuce hasn’t been properly washed.
But organisms harmful to human beings can literally just be inside of fresh picked food even though it has been washed because it’s inside the food and the epidermis in the rind and all that stuff protect what’s In the flesh of the food and keep it safe until it can invade your body.
This is why World sanitation is so important. And why it is important that the countries from which we import our food have the opportunity to enjoy the health and sanitation we expect and desire our own people.
Because they water, or spray, the tomatoes and many other vegetables with pig shit slurry.
Some framers out there are truly disgusting animals.