- Check Lu-Ann Farrar’s blog today to see what she has to say about the current usages of words such as organic, artisan and self-sustaining on food labels.
By the time the FDA gets around to telling us there’s an outbreak of salmonella or E.Coli, we’ve probably already eaten the product. When many of us buy ground beef or fresh tomatoes, we go directly home and have them for dinner.
But then the next time we go to the market, we avoid ground beef and fresh tomatoes. Now we find out the FDA is wrong about tomatoes. It’s the jalapeno pepper that might have caused the recent salmonella outbreak. So now we’re avoiding jalapenos.
When the FDA issues such a warning, it has severe consequences for growers. According to the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, one Kentucky farm family has lost a contract to sell jalapeno peppers to a major retailer because of the FDA’s guidance, even though they grow their peppers under Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) guidelines and there is nothing connecting their products to this outbreak.
Kentucky vegetable growers and processors follow guidelines set up by the GAP program, which educates farmers on the best practices for growing, transporting and handling produce to minimize the risk of food contamination. The state and the University of Kentucky launched GAP last year. Since then, 855 Kentucky producers have been trained on GAP principles.
We can feel confident when we buy Kentucky Proud fruits and vegetables that they’re safe.
