Ben Chapman and I wrote in the Windsor Star today that self-proclaimed food safety guru Dan Dempster, president of the Canadian Produce Marketing Association, either knows something about the microbial safety of fresh produce that has escaped, oh, everyone else, or he is spinning when he says that produce "is actually the safest fresh food group."

Yeah, compared to fresh ground beef, produce looks safe; but consumers ain’t lining up for cooked lettuce.

As we wrote,

"It’s easy to write off Dempster’s letter as a marketing puff piece, which it is, especially since he had a real opportunity to acknowledge the risks associated with fresh fruits and vegetables and focus on the proactive efforts the produce industry is taking to actively reduce them."

What’s not puff is the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control report on multistate outbreaks of Salmonella infections associated with raw tomatoes eaten in U.S. restaurants in 2005 and 2006.

"During 2005–2006, four large multistate outbreaks of Salmonella infections associated with eating raw tomatoes at restaurants occurred in the United States. The four outbreaks resulted in 459 culture-confirmed cases of salmonellosis in 21 states."

In Virginia in 2005, the outbreak strain of S. Newport was isolated from irrigation pond water near tomato fields. In another outbreak, the tomatoes were grown in Florida near multiple potential animal reservoirs of Salmonella (e.g., cattle, wild pigs, wild birds, amphibians, and reptiles) present in and adjacent to the drainage ditches.

We’ve outlined lots of proactive steps that can be undertaken by fresh fruit and vegetable growers.