Post

Ranked #3 on Hacker News with 137 points and 56 comments.

A company’s public statement in the middle of an outbreak is not marketing. It is evidence — what the company said it knew, and when, published to the world at a moment when nobody had the benefit of hindsight. I have built cases on those statements since 1993. I have been reading and saving this one since the day the recall issued, and the sixteen days since are worth laying out end to end, because the words have moved a great deal and the substance underneath them has not moved at all.

Start with the original. On July 17 the company posted a statement that opened with the people who got sick — the ill, their families, and Americans whose trust in produce had been shaken. It said that trust took decades to earn. It said the removal of product was based on information FDA had provided the day before. And it said something that has not appeared in a single version since: that FDA’s traceback was pointing to a specific independent farm, described as less than one percent of the United States iceberg supply, as the potential source.

The recall was July 17. FDA reported a positive test on July 18. FDA retracted that result as a false positive on July 19. The July 17 statement therefore explains why the company pulled product at a moment when no positive laboratory result existed anywhere in the world, and the reason it gives is FDA’s traceback and the epidemiology. That is a party admission, and nothing published afterward reaches back and unsays it.

Two days later the same address served a different document. The July 19 version led with the assertion that FDA had apologized to the company. Sympathy for the sick moved from the first paragraph to the fourth and got shorter. The recall was recast in the completed past tense and attributed to an abundance of caution. The acknowledgment about the specific farm was gone. I wrote that night about how the victims ate the evidence in May , and I have not changed my view since.

There was no apology. I went looking for one in FDA’s July 19 update and what is there is a laboratory correction and a notification to the firm — and in the same paragraph, a statement that FDA continues working with the firm to ensure product implicated in this outbreak has been removed. The word implicated survived the false positive. The next day FDA answered in public without naming anybody : the false-positive sample does not change the basis for the investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the recall, and traceback and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico. Note the plural locations. The company had described one independent farm at less than one percent of supply and then stopped describing it at all.

By July 24 the page had been rewritten again, this time leading with money — more than two hundred million dollars a year in independently audited food safety protocols — and reporting that sourcing and central-Mexico production had been suspended since July 18 and independent experts commissioned for a top-to-bottom review. The apology claim was simply absent. No correction, no note, no acknowledgment it had ever been there.