A Whole Lot Of Words

Let the games begin. May they prove fruitful for all concerned.

You’ve read Tom Karst’s report of Tony DiMare’s opening statement at the House hearings this afternoon. Besides this document, I’ve briefly glanced at the ones by Dr. Acheson of the FDA and Dr. Osterholm of the University of Minnesota. Nothing earth-shattering there---they say what you’d expect them to say---Acheson dancing & ‘CYA’-ing, and Osterholm interestingly scaling somewhat back in his vitriol towards the process. Check ‘em out yourself at Tom’s link provided above.

But…so far, the star of the show for me is Tom Stenzel of the United Fresh Produce Association. He’s comes as close as anyone at pointing the finger at FDA’s methodology, which is at the crux of the matter:


Despite some hurdles which I will address later, FDA in fact was able to trace tomatoes eaten by sick consumers back to the farm. The only problem was those tracebacks kept pointing to different farms. Rather than complaining about the complexity of the tomato industry and so-called false leads sending the search to myriad farms across two countries, the evidence was staring government in the face. There was no common point where all of these tomatoes could have been contaminated, whether at the farm or in repacking at the wholesale level. Traceback worked; it just didn’t confirm the hypothesis that the Centers for Disease Control had advanced, and that we now know was most likely wrong.


And, due no doubt to repeated calls from membership up and down the tomato distribution chain, Stenzel pleads for compensation, sympathetically but shrewdly:


If I may Mr. Chairman, let me conclude with a brief comment about compensation. We all know the error in CDC’s initial assessment that fresh tomatoes were the sole cause of this outbreak. While CDC has not yet stepped away from its suspicion that tomatoes might have caused some of the earlier illnesses, this is neither a likely nor plausible position without some real evidence. The fact that consumers didn’t know that they had eaten jalapenos chopped up in salsas, garnishes, or other foods is no reason for CDC to cling to the accuracy of their initial food surveys just out of pride. Even good scientists can make a mistake, and there’s no shame in admitting that consumers apparently were just unaware of this hidden ingredient in their foods.

There can be no doubt that this has been a disaster for the tomato industry, and we support Congressman Mahoney’s HR 6581 as a step toward providing disaster assistance to our agricultural sector just as vital as any hurricane or flood. It’s also a fact that this disaster struck every company in the tomato supply chain whether they had to discard full warehouses of perfectly healthy tomatoes, haul product to the dump, watch fruit rot on the vine, or plow fields under. I know well that this is the Agriculture Committee, but I ask you to think about both the growers we represent, and also our growers’ customers who had already paid for their produce, but were forced to discard millions of dollars of product.


More comments later, but I’ll need a whole pitcher of iced tea to decipher some of this stuff, and the ulterior motives attached.

Later,

Jay