I was about to run out to the store for some tomatoes, hoping to make my first batch of summer gazpacho, when I remembered the salmonella outbreak. I checked the FDA’s website for the status, and encountered these photos:

The first thing that I noticed is that these look like perfectly normal tomatoes. Salmonella, a bacterium, is invisible to the naked eye. So why is the FDA showing me absolutely useless pictures of infected tomatoes?

The second thing I noticed is that the captions seem to attribute blame — and, therefore, agency — to the tomatoes themselves, as though they actively conspired to spread disease among the human population. The images now look more like police lineup photos, like something on the FBI’s most wanted list: