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From the LA Times:

Restaurants, fast-food chains and supermarkets across Southern California removed fresh red Roma, plum and red round tomatoes from their shelves and took them off their menus this weekend as the U.S. government warned of a widening outbreak of salmonella.

The Food and Drug Administration said consumers should avoid raw red plum, red Roma or round red tomatoes, which have been tied to 145 infections reported since mid-April.

I drove 1600 miles this weekend on a trip marked by dining, of both the fine and fast categories. The lack of tomatoes across all spectrums of dining was noticeable. What’s curious is the scope of the tomato shortage, given the nature of the problem. For the sake of 145 illnesses, with 23 hospitalizations, many restaurants stopped serving tomatoes and many grocers halted sales of at least thee kinds of tomatoes. Given the enormous quantity of American consumption, and the food and feed shortage we’re facing on a global scale, it seems puzzling that we’d destroy food. Granted people are getting sick enough to require medical care, but other people are dying of starvation. Destroying a large supply of any food would seem an act of imprudence, likely driving up already high food costs and increasing the likelihood of starvation-related deaths worldwide.

Photo courtesy Junjan at Flickr.

We’re out of troops?

After the last of the five “surge” brigades goes home this summer, the U.S. Army will have 13 brigade combat teams in Iraq (the Marines have two more) and two in Afghanistan. One BCT serves as a “global response force,” ready to respond to a small-scale emergency elsewhere in the world. One is in Korea. One is dedicated to homeland defense and security. One, at a base in Fort Riley, Kan., is training soldiers to become advisers to Iraqi and Afghan security forces. That adds up to 19 BCTs. All the other Army brigades are either between deployments or in their 12-month downtime periods, having fulfilled their 12-to-15-month deployment tours. (For a little more detail on these numbers, click here.)

And that’s it. There are no more combat brigades left.

Photo courtesy annibee at Flickr.

I’ve often wondered why more actors don’t extend their talents to global problems. High marks to Jennifer Connelly and director Terry George for putting together charity:water to produce this PSA about the cost of worldwide water shortage. I realize most people will scoff at the idea of New York running out of water, but on NPR Friday I heard a discussion about the amount of water available to central florida. Of course, for many cities water shortage is already a reality, but for now most people see this as a problem unique to the developing world.