"We were a victim of a total government screw-up."

Graves Williams, a farmer in Quincy, Fla., was just a few days into a six-week tomato harvest in June 2008, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warnings linking tomatoes to a salmonella outbreak in New Mexico and Texas. Americans stopped buying tomatoes. Williams let about 80 percent of his crop rot in the fields that summer. Other farmers couldn’t sell their tomatoes either.

The loss, it turns out, was for nothing: Serrano and jalapeño peppers were the real culprit. But that doesn’t mean the federal government owes tomato growers like Williams anything for their ruined harvest.

Read more at Bloomberg.