Food safety worries change buying habits

WASHINGTON — Troubled by the tainted tomato scare, nearly half of Americans are concerned they may get sick from eating contaminated food and are avoiding items they normally would buy, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll has found.

Although three in four remain confident about the overall safety of foods, the poll found that consumers overwhelmingly support setting up a tracing system for produce in the wake of the salmonella outbreak first linked to tomatoes and, now, hot peppers.

Eighty-six percent 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. Although federal officials lifted the tomato warning Thursday, the cause of the outbreak remains unknown.

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, although produce increasingly is being implicated in outbreaks.

Christy Taylor, a first-grade teacher from Sacramento, Calif., said she has all but given up on supermarket produce and is buying most of her fresh fruits and vegetables at the local farmers' market instead.

"I see the same farmers every single week," said Taylor, 30, the mother of 2-year-old twin girls. "You meet the people and you see where the (produce) is coming from."

Her twins love tomatoes, she said, and chomp on them as if they were apples. But until the mystery of the tainted tomatoes is solved, "I feel a little bit more comfortable, a little more safe, doing the local farmers' market," Taylor said.

In addition to the salmonella outbreak, this year has seen the largest ground beef recall in history, raising consumer concerns reflected in the poll.

Forty-six percent said they were worried they might get sick from eating contaminated food and that they have avoided foods because of safety warnings that they normally would have purchased. Twenty-nine percent have thrown out food earlier than usual and 14 percent have returned food to the store.

Such a level of uneasiness among consumers is "very significant," said Michael R. Taylor, a former senior federal food safety official who now teaches at George Washington University.