Cindy pointed me to a story on the Financial Post Blog about the big tomato scare. It’s too good not to bring to your attention. Here’s how Financial Post editor, Terence Corcoran, describes how the whole mess got started.

It begins with a food poisoning, gets picked up by brain-dead media, story flies out of control for 48 hours, regulators swing into extreme self-preservation mode, risk-ignorant consumers 2,000 kilometres away get confused and panicky, and the food in question — a billion dollar industry — gets blown away.

Exactly. Our main, traditional media outlets of today are so out of control it’s no wonder people are looking elsewhere for information. Here’s an interesting point made in the post on the FP:

Enhancing the media-led distortion is the fact that the original story is wrong: The man allegedly killed by tomato salmonella after eating at a Houston, Texas, restaurant — 67-year-old Raul Rivera — actually did not die from the tomato he ate. Kathy Barton, a Houston health official, said Mr. Rivera’s official cause of death is cancer. The Texas health department reports it has no deaths from salmonella poisoning.

I wonder if that story got corrected. We certainly live in a society where people and especially many in the media are looking for a scapegoat for every little thing that happens. No one wants to claim their own responsibility and as the FP says, consumers of today have, “almost willfull ignorance of risk.” This is why it’s more important than ever for anyone involved in agribusiness to be looking at new ways to communicate and dare I say that we can all do it ourselves now? I looked for some tomato grower organizations with blogs and couldn’t find any. Seems like it would be a good place to be writing about the truth on this story!