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If politics make for great live theater, then a Feb. 22 hearing held in Sacramento about the controversial strawberry fumigant methyl iodide might have been scripted by Franz Kafka. And much like a Kafka tale, there are stories behind stories.

The characters include a state pesticide department that ignored its own scientists’ warnings; the department’s hired expert and his band of scientific brothers whom methyl iodide’s manufacturer claims went rogue and exceeded the scope of their established mission; a produce industry worth billions of dollars to the state economy; and the private-equity backed maker of the product they call MIDAS, whose company tagline reads “Bold, Agile and Customer Driven.”

More specifically, the characters are:

The state Department of Pesticide Regulation (headed by former California Farm Bureau Federation executive Mary-Ann Warmerdam), which last December approved methyl iodide’s registration in California, paving the way for pesticide applicators to seek permits to fumigate strawberry fields with the substance.

DPR hired gun, scientist John Froines, a bona fide member of the Chicago Seven turned Yale chemistry Ph.D. Now a professor of environmental health at UCLA, Froines was paid by the DPR to lead a scientific review of methyl iodide. During the Sacramento hearing, his simple statements – “Science was subverted” in the approval process and “there is no safe level of release” when it comes to the fumigant – had jaws dropping.