Tens of thousands of Americans got sick from cyclospora because somewhere between the farm and the fork someone f*cked up the lettuce. The FDA spent months figuring out what a community college food science major could have told them in June. Experts now confirm that the U.S. food safety system has problems. Mounting problems. Problems that have been mounting for years, apparently, which raises the question of what the f*ck everyone was doing while the problems mounted.
Brandon Gomez at CNBC explores the challenges facing both sectors. Private sector can't stop shipping parasite salad. Public sector can't find the parasite salad fast enough to matter. Forty-seven states reported illness starting in mid-May. The outbreak happened during peak investor confidence in consumer staples as a defensive play. Retail traders bought Kroger calls while cyclospora turned their intestines into a water park.
The magnitude here is instructive. Not the outbreak magnitude. The magnitude of incompetence required to let a single-celled parasite outsmart the entire American food supply chain for months. This is the same country that figured out how to put cheese in a spray can and somehow got people to buy it. But tracking which farm sent the bad spinach? Beyond our capabilities.
Pressure mounts at the FDA. It mounted in June. Kept mounting in July. Still mounting now, presumably, unless mounting has a weight limit we hit somewhere around August. Meanwhile the private sector waits for guidance that never comes with enough speed or clarity to prevent the next wave of Americans gambling their digestive health on a Cobb salad.
Your technical analysis said nothing about cyclospora risk when you went long on restaurant chains. The charts showed a bullish engulfing pattern. What they didn't show was the engulfing pattern happening in your colon three days after eating contaminated cilantro.
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