Since a salmonella scare has caused many customers to shun what's normally a summer favorite, tomato farmers across the nation have had to plow under their fields and leave their crop to rot in packinghouses. As losses across the supply chain top $100 million, industry leaders are calling for a congressional investigation into the government's handling of the as-yet unsolved outbreak. McDonald's Corporation, Wendy's International and Yum Brands resumed offering some tomatoes on their menus in the last few weeks. But now tomato farmers said their summer season has already withered despite U.S. authorities' recent announcement that some other type of fresh produce might have caused the country's largest salmonella outbreak.
The outbreak has sickened 922 people in 40 states.

"Now the government has a doubt as to whether it was tomatoes after they've already blackened our eye?" said Paul DiMare, president of The DiMare Companies in Johns Island, South Carolina. "June and July are the best time of the year for tomatoes, but our movement has completely stopped in the United States." Farmers, packers and shippers fear it could take months to rebuild the $1.3 billion market for fresh tomatoes. In Fresno County, deep in California's heartland, one grower chose to lose 225,000 dollars by letting his tomatoes rot in the fields this weekend because he would have taken a bigger hit hiring crews to harvest them, said Ed Beckman, president of the statewide cooperative California Tomato Farmers. Officials with the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said the sheer complexity of the outbreak and the industry's vast international supply chain have hampered efforts to find the sources of contamination. However, recent evidence links the salmonella outbreak with the consumption of food that took place in restaurants, which has resulted in the broadening of the investigation to include foods commonly consumed with tomatoes, such as jalapeno peppers fresh cilantro, scallions, and onions.