Thanks for the sympathy, all ! I am not miserable, it is just an annoyance. I mostly wanted to sound the alert as we are going into the holidays and menus are being finalized. And for most people, food flavors are one of the first pleasures of life. Actually, food is usually discussed in Thanksgiving kitchens and dining rooms, too, so I was hoping the word would get spread even further. If I had read about it I might have decided to hold off on pine nuts for a year or two till they established definitively what is the source of the ones which have this effect.
One thing they know is that it is not like an allergy which only affects some people. I have always eaten them and never had any problem; all the complaints to the FDA are coming from the last couple of years.
It reminds you how hard it is to find out where anything you eat comes from. I did get a response from the supermarket, that they would investigate the source of the ones I bought right away. But the problem is, you don't know at the time you buy, which is true even for most products from most health food stores. For some people, it would even be a selling point that they were buying American pinyon nuts harvested by Native Americans, or Italian or other Mediterranean ones from the Stone Pine, which have been eaten since prehistoric times. For now, if people can't get that information, the best they can do with the limited information available is to get big ones - and of course, the more expensive ones are more likely to have originated in the US or Europe.