Death by Cantaloupe

The other day, I went to the famers’ market at Boston’s City Hall and bought what’s likely the last of the summer’s corn, and the last of the summer’s tomatoes, so that my husband and I could enjoy the last of the summer’s feasts. As with the Red Sox, it’s wait until next year, only in this case it’s not for a better, more likable team, but for corn on the cob that tastes like corn on the cob, and tomatoes that taste like tomatoes.

I also bought the first of the fall McIntosh apples. Just one. Tomorrow, I’m making my annual pilgrimage to Happy Apple (Brookfield Orchard), and will set in a supply. But when I walked by the Noquochoke Orchards stand, I developed a complete and utter craving from a bite of the perfect apple, which to me is, was, and always will be the Mac.

Before I took that first bite, I asked the guy running the stand whether I needed to wash it first. He told me it had been washed, and that I should just polish it off on my jacket – which was what I had intended to do to begin with, not being a particular food paranoiac. I guess I asked the guy because I didn’t want to appear to be a complete and utter slob of the sort that would pick an apple core out of the gutter and gnaw on it. Which I decidedly am not. Still, I’m not someone who believes you have to perform a surgical scrub on a piece of fruit before eating it.

Perhaps I should be a bit more careful in the future – if not with apples, then with cantaloupe, what with the listeria outbreak.

The toll from listeria-tainted cantaloupes has risen to 18 dead and 100 sickened, the Centers for Disease Control reported on Wednesday. (Source: IB Times.)

There’s another death that’s pending addition to the official list, plus a miscarriage. The contaminated cantaloupes all come from Jensen Farms in Colorado, which is in the Rocky Ford area which is, apparently, the place to grow cantaloupes. In mid-September, the suspect cantaloupes were recalled, after having been distributed to over a dozen states.

Lest you think that the cantaloupe recall is listeria hysteria, listeriosis – the infection caused by listeria – can result in meningitis and sepsis, and has a mortality rate of 25 percent. Them odds ain’t all that good.

Inevitably, multiple law suits have already been lodged. In one, a Baltimore woman is suing because her 87 year old father has died from a listeria infection tied to Jensen Farms cantaloupes. While I’m sure it’s a shocker to lose a parent so suddenly, there is something to say for dying relatively quickly, at great old age, as a result of doing something pleasurable, like eating cantaloupe. As opposed to spending the final weeks/months of your life intubated in a hospital or gaga in a nursing home.

Still, if Jensen Farms, or their distributor, is somehow culpable of negligence, then they ought to pay up.

Still, I hate the thought of those 1-800-AMBULANCE CHASER law firms going ka-ching, ka-ching each time they hear about another death.

Still, I hate to see this happening to a fourth-generation, non-pesticide farm rather than to some agri-business behemoth.

Meanwhile, given our suit-happy populous, I’m thinking that just maybe there’s a revision due to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief. To Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, we may have to add Litigation.

Easy for me to say, of course. If someone I loved died from eating cantaloupe, I’d probably be on the horn to the Law Offices of James R. Sokolove in a nano-second.

Anyway, the thought that the food we eat can be so hazardous to our health is pretty scary, that’s for sure.

This may have happened all the time in the good old days – I seem to remember an episode of The Virginian it which Betsey Garth came down with typhoid after washing strawberries in contaminated water - but there sure does seem to be more of it happening since the food-industrial complex began producing square tomatoes, and making sure that there’s a hormone-inflated chicken breast in every pot and blueberries on the supermarket shelves 12 months a year, rather than 1 or 2.

Until I read about the cantaloupe deaths, I hadn’t realized that you’re supposed to wash the outside of fruits that you peel. My not knowing this should come as no surprise, given how half-assed I am about washing fruits and veggies that you don’t peel. (Yes, of course I rinse fruit and vegetables, with an occasional backslide like I did at the farmers’ market.)

It seems that listeria on the rind of the cantaloupe is introduced to the inner fruit when it was cut up. Who knew?

Does this mean rinsing oranges and watermelons, too?

Kind of makes you want to be a loca-locavore, producing all of your own food, and having 24/7 quality and safety inspectors on hand for good measure.

Listeria, by the way, isn’t the main source of listeria infection. Meat and poultry are worse. WebMD even advises:

• Heat hot dogs, deli meats, and cold cuts until they are steaming hot just before serving.

Steaming hot cold cuts? They have to be kidding.You have to heat the baloney before you slap it onto a slice of Wonder Bread?

Anyway, my sympathies to all those who have lost someone or been stricken by doing something as wholesome and innocent as eating a cantaloupe. And sympathy to the folks at Jensen Farms (unless it turns out there were truly negligent here). It must be terrible to feel that you may have unintentionally caused grievous harm, while at the same time wondering whether your own livelihood is jeopardized.

As for myself, I am going off to eat a Bosc pear and ponder how careful I need to be when it comes to the old food chain. Do I need to pour boiling water over the pear? Spray it with Fantastik? And what about my hands that touched the pear before realizing it may be contaminated? Do I boil them in Fantastik, too? Do we have to start wearing latex gloves all the time?

Seems like, these days, ‘be afraid, be very afraid’ are words to live by.