Nut Growers Bristle at FDA's Warning

Not surprisingly, pistachio growers are complaining about the Food and Drug Administration's blanket warning against eating any pistachio products.

The warning came after the discovery of salmonella-tainted nuts from a California plant operated by Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, owned by Setton International Foods.

"The FDA is painting with a pretty broad brush," Richard Matoian, executive director of the Western Pistachio Association, told the Los Angeles Times. "The reality is that only one processor is affected by the voluntary recall, and it involves only a small portion of that company's inventory."

True, but that one processor is the country's second largest, and it supplies nuts to dozens of companies, which put them into hundreds of products. The company exports pistachios to more than 30 foreign countries, boasts its Web site, which makes no mention its recall of 2 million pounds of nuts, or any mention at all of its tainted product.

"We know that the farm in California shipped its products to 36 wholesalers," said David Acheson, the FDA' assistant commissioner for food safety. "But what we don't know yet is what those wholesalers did with them."

Given what happened recently with tainted peanuts - several deaths, hundreds of illnesses - a temporary blanket warning about pistachios seems reasonable. There are reports that some people have gotten sick after eating pistachios, but so far no illness has been directly tied to the tainted pistachios. It also should be borne in mind that pistachios are far less ubiquitous than are peanuts, so if there is an outbreak, it's likely to be much smaller than the peanut incident.

Kraft Foods, which first reported the tainted nuts to the FDA last week, says its audit of Setton's plant found that raw and roasted nuts were being mixed together. Roasting kills salmonella that might be present in raw nuts.

Kraft has added its Plantar's brand pistachio nuts to its recall. PepsiCo's Frito-Lay unit has recalled its pistachio products, and grocers nationwide are pulling products containing pistachios from their shelves.

Kroger, which issued a limited recall of its store-brand nuts from Setton on Friday, several days after the discovery of salmonella at Setton's plant, has added another lot of its Private Selection nuts to the recall. And unlike its previous announcement, Kroger's latest warning cites Setton as the source of the tainted nuts, though it doesn't mention the FDA's blanker warning.

Also, it turns out that the Stanley Stud Sensor 200, which Kroger had earlier fingered on its recall page as being tainted with salmonella and so shouldn't be eaten, isn't diseased after all. In some cases, the tool's software has a bug, though.