Schools remove tomatoes

Students in the Laguna Beach Unified School District will not get tomatoes in their school lunches for the rest of the school year in response to the recent salmonella outbreak. The school year ends Wednesday.

On June 5, district Food Services Supervisor Debra Appel received an e-mail from the FDA stating raw red plum, red Roma and round red tomatoes are the possible link to a national food scare while cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, tomatoes on the vine and homegrown tomatoes are safe to eat.

Since the FDA warning, Appel has notified the district’s food vendors to pull almost all tomatoes from prepared school lunch items.

“Although we will be serving cherry tomatoes in salads, we’ve decided to err on the side of caution by not serving tomatoes for the rest of the year,” Appel said.

Some Laguna Beach restaurants, such as Ocean Avenue Brewery and Pasta Pomodoro, have followed suit by pulling raw tomatoes off of their menus altogether until further notice, while other restaurants like La Sirena Grill are switching distributors.

“We were able to buy a small amount of tomatoes for our menu items from Sebastian’s Daily Fresh Wholesale Produce, because they provided a certificate stating that their tomatoes are grown in California,” said La Sirena Grill’s manager, Nacho Martinez.

At this time, the FDA has not been able to identify the source of the outbreak.

However, tomatoes grown in California have not been implicated in the outbreak.