FDA issues warning about pistachios

March 30, 2009 – 10:23 pm – No Comment

First it was peanuts, now pistachios…perhaps there won’t be any nuts left by the end of 2010.

The FDA has issued a warning to not eat pistachios until it can find out where a strain of salmonella came from exactly. This time they believe it came from pistachios at California-based Setton Farms, the country’s second largest pistachio processor. They have voluntarily issued a recall of about 1 million pounds of pistachios.

The recalled nuts represent a small fraction of the 60 million pounds of pistachios that the company’s plant can process each year and an even smaller portion of the 278 million pounds produced in the state in the 2008 season, according to the Fresno-based Administrative Committee for Pistachios.

California alone is the second-largest producer of pistachios in the world.

The FDA learned about the problem last Tuesday, when Kraft Foods Inc. notified the agency that it had detected salmonella in roasted pistachios through routine product testing. Kraft and the Georgia Nut Co. recalled their Back to Nature Nantucket Blend trail mix the next day.

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