The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can’t eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as ’progress’, doesn’t spread.

Rooney’s joke targets a familiar modern irony: institutions can optimize measurable traits—appearance, durability, transportability—while neglecting the basic human purpose of the thing being improved. The “perfect” tomato that can’t be eaten satirizes technocratic notions of progress that prize efficiency and marketability over lived experience and common sense. By calling progress a “disease,” he flips the usual positive connotation and warns that innovation can become self-justifying, spreading into domains where it diminishes quality rather than enhancing it. The line fits Rooney’s broader skepticism about bureaucracy and consumer culture, urging readers to ask: progress for whom, and toward what end?