Food fears linger for many people, AP poll shows
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By The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The tomato scare may be over, but it has taken a toll — it’s cost the industry an estimated $100 million and left millions of people with a new wariness about the safety of everyday foods.
An Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that almost half of consumers have changed their eating and buying habits in the past six months because they’re afraid they could get sick from eating contaminated food.
They also overwhelmingly support setting up a better system to trace suspect produce back to the source, the poll found.
The people who say so include the growers.
Virginia’s East Coast Brokers, one of the largest tomato growers in the country, has been hammered by slumping demand and falling prices, although Virginia tomatoes were cleared early in the scare, said sales manager Batista Madonia III.
He said he’s frustrated by the government’s inability to find the root cause of the salmonella outbreak despite a nearly two-month long investigation.
The salmonella outbreak has sickened more than 1,200 people in 42 states since the first cases were seen in April.
(Two Nebraskans were made sick during the outbreak, but they picked up their illness while traveling in other states, according to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.)
Although federal officials lifted the warning against certain types of tomatoes Thursday, the cause of the outbreak remains unknown. Hot peppers are under suspicion, and tomatoes have not been cleared everywhere.
The poll found that three in four people remain confident about the overall safety of food, 46 percent said they were worried they might get sick from eating contaminated products. The same percentage said that because of safety warnings, they have avoided items they normally would have purchased.
Eighty-six percent in the poll said produce should be labeled so it can be tracked through layers of processors, packers and shippers, all the way back to the farm. The lack of such a system frustrated disease detectives working on the salmonella outbreak.
But the industry is divided over mandatory tracing technology, and Congress is running out of time to act on any major food safety changes before the election.
The poll found that 80 percent of Americans said they would support new federal standards for fresh produce. Meat and poultry have long been subject to enforceable federal safeguards, but fruits and vegetables are not.
The high level of uneasiness should not be taken lightly, said Michael R. Taylor, a former senior federal food safety official who now teaches at George Washington University.
“When you have almost half the population avoiding certain foods because of safety concerns, that’s very significant from the standpoint of economic impact for the people selling the food, and from the standpoint of peace of mind for consumers,” said Taylor.
In addition to the salmonella outbreak, this year has seen the largest ground beef recall in history, raising anxieties reflected in the poll.
The survey found gender, racial and economic gaps on attitudes about food safety.
Women, who do most of the shopping, were more concerned than men. For example, 39 percent of men said they were “very confident” that the food they buy is safe, but only 23 percent of women said they felt that way. Men and women agreed on the need for better federal oversight.
In Congress, a leading advocate of food safety reforms said the industry would do well to listen to consumers on the need for tracing.
“We live in an age of technology where you can bar-code a banana,” said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “We’ve got to work this through with the industry and come up with something that’s reasonable. The more confidence consumers have, the more goods they will purchase.”
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