Just when you though it was safe to go back in the water…

Oh, wait. That’s another story entirely!

But fans of fresh tomatoes can now rejoice as the U.S. government declared late last week that tomatoes are back on the market.

That being said, an APB is still out on hot peppers, including fresh jalapenos and serranos, and any dishes that may contain them, such as fresh salsa. Another possible suspect is fresh cilantro.

While all fingers originally pointed to tomatoes as the culprit of the recent salmonella outbreak, which has sickened 1,220 people in 42 states since April 10 (the latest illness reported was July 4), today’s tomatoes in fields and stores are safe to eat, according to Dr. David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety chief.

The even better news is that there are 288 days until Cinco de Mayo–surely all of this will be figured out by then!

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The tomato investigation that I talked about last week is ongoing. In the meantime, one of the owners of Farm Fresh To You, which delivers delicious produce to my doorstep every week, put some perspective on the whole tomato harvesting issue.

Red round tomatoes are harvested when they’re still hard and green. They are harvested by hand into buckets, and those buckets are in turn dumped into large bins. The bins are then dumped into a wash tank, and the tomatoes are washed and then run through a mechanical sizing system. From there they are packed into boxes and stored to be sold on an as needed basis. Only when they are sold are they ripened by a gas which turns them from green to red.

This convenient system obviously has a big problem–namely that if one batch of tomatoes is contaminated, they contaminate the wash water and all the tomatoes that water comes in contact with. Not only that, but if the mechanical packing system is contaminated, tomatoes will continue to be contaminated. Because the system relies on economy of scale, it also makes it hard to track down where contaminated tomatoes came from, and what other crops they have been in contact with.

Farm Fresh To You is able to maintain cleaner standards because the crop size is smaller, which means while everyone else is worried if the tomatoes they are buying are clean or not, I know the ones in my house are.

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Last week, the nation was hit with a tomato recall, which is ironic, since just yesterday I was waxing poetic about red produce.

It seems that a bad crop of tomatoes has sickened at least 167 people with salmonella poisoning with reported cases from April 16 through May 26.

Both the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been working feverishly to determine which regions were likely the source of the bacterial contamination.

While investigators have already concluded that certain types of tomatoes such as cherry, vine-ripened and grape are not the culprit, because they haven’t ruled out large tomato crop producers such as Mexico and Florida, there is still great concern.

The FDA has already cleared California because they ship tomatoes from June through December, that leaves Mexico and Florida up for grabs.

The FDA said tomatoes exported to the U.S. from Canada, Netherlands, Dominican Republic, Belgium, Costa Rica and Israel are safe to eat, as well as tomatoes from Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia.

The 167 cases, which were reported in 17 states, landed 23 individuals in the hospital and was even linked to the death of a 67-year-old cancer patient in Texas (chemotherapy and other cancer treatments weaken the immune system, making them unable to fight bacteria, which can make even the most common cold deadly).

Among those proactively removing tomatoes from their shelves and menus are McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Burger King, Kroger, Outback Steakhouse, Winn-Dixie and Taco Bell, unless the tomatoes were grown in certain states and countries.

The FDA has cleared cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, tomatoes sold with the vine still attached and homegrown tomatoes, as well as raw red Roma, red plum and round red tomatoes from Arkansas, California, Georgia, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Belgium, Canada, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Israel, Netherlands and Puerto Rico.

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