Don’t expect the government to keep the nation’s food supply safe.

The Food and Drug Administration is vastly underfunded and understaffed to meet its mandate, said Mickey Parish, Nutrition and Food Science chair at the University of Maryland, College Park. The latest outbreak comes exactly one year after the agency published a plan to keep consumers safe from salmonella in tomatoes.

“They had planned to begin some aspects of their plan last fall, and it really didn’t begin until this spring,” Parish said. “It comes back to the fact that the FDA is terribly understaffed.”

The agency’s plan for protecting us from salmonella in tomatoes did not come with a price tag, according to the Government Accountability Office, but the FDA asked for $90 million this year and received $45 million toward the cause. The GAO estimates it would cost $259 million to inspect every U.S. food producer under FDA review one time.

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At least 228 people nationwide have been sickened by tomatoes contaminated with a rare strain of salmonella bacteria — including one Baltimore resident, who did not require hospitalization, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So far, federal authorities discovered the bad fruit that affected 23 states since mid-April came from Florida or Mexico. The tomato recall did not include cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, vine-attached tomatoes, or yellow, green or UglyRipe tomatoes, the FDA said.

How do you tell if tomatoes are safe to eat?

“If I had any questions as someone buying tomatoes, I’d go to a farmers market or a supermarket that says it buys its produce locally,” said Jerry Brust, integrated pest management agent for the University of Maryland’s extension office.

The FDA said Roma and round red tomatoes grown in Maryland and the surrounding states are safe from the salmonella outbreak, but only a handful of greenhouse growers are producing them at this time of year, Brust said.

“Right now, any type of fresh tomato will have come from down South, unless they’re greenhouse-grown, and those are usually labeled as such because they’re at a premium,” he said.

Near the end of the tomato-growing season, which runs from late winter to early spring in Florida and Mexico, farms may exchange inventory with one another in order to meet shipping quotas, Brust said — making it even tougher to track the exact source of the salmonella.

khille@baltimoreexaminer.com

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com