If you are reassured by our government’s ability to tackle the hard questions and arrive at definitive answers, you may be suffering a crisis of disbelief about now. That’s because the “salmonella caper” has left officials befuddled and mystified, no closer to the solution than they were 11 weeks ago, when it all began.
As in all mysteries, detectives start with established facts. And some things are known. The Saintpaul strain of salmonella is now responsible for the largest salmonella outbreak on the US, sickening 810 people in 36 states and Washington, DC. We know it has caused economic hardship for everyone in its path, from farmers, to distributors, to retailers who sell tomatoes and restauranteurs who depend on tomatoes.
We know Food and Drug Administration investigators have examined tomato producers from Texas, to Florida, to Mexico. So far of 1700 samples taken, all were negative.
The outbreak has, so far, cost the food industry $100 million, and still counting.
That’s what we know. What we don’t know is how it is going to affect trade rivalries between tomato growers in Florida and Mexico, who have been at odds since the mid-1990s. Mexico now exports more than $960 million in tomatoes to the U.S. The problem is that the growing seasons of Florida and Mexico overlap. This creates tensions for US growers who introduce their tomato crops into markets flooded by tomatoes from Mexico. This latest crisis could be bad news for Mexican importers.
There’s another key component to the mystery that we don’t know. Tomatoes may not even be the culprit! Not only do the investigators no know the country or region where the outbreak started, they now concede they are not certain tomatoes caused the problem in the first place. Some people who were sickened ate tomatoes that were combined in other dishes such as salsa or guacamole. The suspect vegetable could have been an avocado or an onion.
In a plot that would drive a mystery writer wild, the suspect tomato takes such a winding, complex path from seed to dining room table that modern-day Sherlock Holmeses are stymied in pinpointing its origin. Tomatoes, after all, do not have their own individual scanning numbers. A tomato that originates in Florida will quite likely take a circuitous route through Mexican sorting and packaging plants, then be reintroduced into the US market.
That leads us to the final, frustrating piece of the puzzle: the mystery may never be solved.