Eating tomatos… damn straight I am

Roma tomatoes were 10.80 pesos per Kilo yesterday at Mega.  You bet I’m gonna eat em.  And already have… so far to no ill effects.

Tomatoes are Sinaloa’s largest legal export crop — there’s even a tomato on the state’s license plate (you were expecting maybe a marijuana leaf?).  In El Debate this morning, several growers were openly speculating that blaming Mexican tomato growers for the salmonella outbreak in the U.S. might have more to do with agricultural protectionism than anything else.  It makes some sense to me.  “Med flies” — which were the big agricultural issue several years ago — were cited as a rationale for keeping Michoacan avocados out of the U.S. … even though the Mediterranean fruit fly can’t live at the altitudes where avocados grow in Michoacan (and the insect isn’t found anywhere in the state).

I also wondered if blaming the growers and the pickers might have something to do with union busting.  Burger King, and their bankers, Goldman-Sachs, have been doing everything possible to undo the affront of having to deal with the tomato pickers’ union.

The PBS News Hour reported yesterday (transcript here) that so far salmonella cases (which are only serious if you have a surpressed immune system — which tomatoes, with their high vitamin C content, keep healthy) have been traced back to New Mexico and Texas.  Given that the only way tomatoes could be contaminated is from being washed in water contaminated with snake shit (really!), it’s more likely to have happened at a packing plant than anywhere else.

And, in Mexico, you wash your raw veggies in soap and water — or, if you’re really, really careful, spray them with anti-bacterial stuff (can’t think of the name, but it’s in every supermarket) — before you eat them anyway. Actually, in Mexico, where you never assume the state managed to resolve all life’s little problems — you wash your hands before you handle food.  Go in the smallest mom-n-pop hole in the wall greasy cuchilla, and there’s a sink in the corner for you to wash up before you eat.  The whole salmonella scare may just come down to the gringo assumption that their food is protected.

So, last night for supper, I had a cheeseburger.  The Nuevo Leon beef should be free of mad cow (something you can’t say about U.S. beef).  Since you can’t make a decent “hamburgesa” without jalepeños — and anything that survives a jalepeño would have probably killed you otherwise, the only real danger (besides the cholesterol) might have been  unpasteurized Chihuahua Mennonite cheese .  Sure as hell wasn’t the tomatoes.  Which were delicious.