Groundhog Day in June

Here we go again. It’s becoming a ritual. You have your dinner, try to digest it normally, then the cell rings.

“You see the Internet?”, a shipper buddy says.
“No…what?”. I’m scrambling to open the laptop at the dinner table. Wife is used to it by now.
“On the AP. Through Yahoo. Found a case in Florida, and in Georgia.” We’re all becoming experts as news sourcing, you understand.

So I read. 228 cases now. 23 states. Acheson of the FDA is now backing off Wednesday’s Sam Spade-like statement that “…we’re close to cracking this case”. Yeah, right, I know it’s gonna end up being Colonel Mustard in the library.

Shipper buddy obviously feels for the tomato industry in general, which is all he’s known and all I’ve known as well.

“I thought we came out the other side already.”
“Not yet, man.”, I counter.
“We’ll be on Good Morning America again tomorrow morning.”

So with the ever-growing & ever-more-specific list of ‘clear’ states and counties, one would think that via normal logic & deduction, and the process of ‘implication by omission’, it’s only a matter of time before the FDA looks at what was shipped when, what areas have been cleared, and comes to a specific determination as to the source of the outbreak.

Where is it? Maybe they’re holding back, remembering the Boskovich/Taco Bell green onion lawsuit last year. Acheson stated yesterday, “We want to be right”.

I want them to be right, too. But right now we’re dying here.