Tracing tomatoes from field to fork _ a new system

WASHINGTON_When there's an urgent need to trace fruits and vegetables in a crisis like the salmonella outbreak, a lot of the pieces for a rapid-response system are in place. But nobody has quite figured out how to put them together to operate seamlessly in the vast American marketplace. The salmonella outbreak has set off a scramble among industry, regulators and lawmakers to devise a system that would allow food to be traced quickly through a serpentine supply chain that spans nations and continents. "We clearly have the technology to trace food from field to fork, but we don't have any national system to coordinate it," said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. In the salmonella case, investigators were slowed by having to sift through batches of paper records at multiple facilities that handle packing and distribution. It got even... [read full story]