Peanut Contamination: Pure Negligence

The Peanut Corporation of America had been knowingly shipping contaminated products since 2007. Click over to read the gruesome horrors of the inspection report, though here's a short version:

The peanuts were processed in a leaky, roach-infested, cracked and crumbling facility that was poorly cleaned. Employee cleanliness procedures were so bad in fact, that visible mold was growing in the coolers, residue wasn't cleaned from machinery between batches, and floor mops and utensils were washed in the same sink.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the dangerous conditions at their factory is that PCA's products didn't sicken and kill more people. To consider how far their products have gotten, even the military is now recalling rations stored in Europe.

And what about the FDA? I have to grant that they're short on inspectors. So short that inspecting plants every 4 years would be a step up. But why did they wait 4 days to issue a recall notice after the King Nut company had already issued their own product recall? Maybe we should take seriously Kerry Trueman's suggestion to relabel the agency "Failure to Do Anything," for I am nothing if not a truth-in-labeling advocate.

How many more demonstrations do we need of the fact that voluntary self-policing doesn't work as a means of getting good citizenship out of corporations?

No human could, or ever should, be allowed to get away with killing eight people and sickening 500 on the excuse that it was a relatively low percentage of the people they'd come in contact with. A person would be in jail for that. A corporation can often go on about its merry way, and the more politically connected they are, the more true that becomes.

And what's a conscientious household to do? Send all the food they buy to a lab on their own dime? If we had to pay to have all our food tested, everyone who wanted food they could trust would have to go back to growing it themselves.

(I'm not against growing your own food, but I also think we're better off not all having to.)

Up next, the farming industrial complex will be bringing methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus to a dinner near you. If you think the peanut butter recalls, and the spinach recalls before that, etc., have been exciting, hang on to your hat ...

(Photo credit: Katie Hannan on Flickr.)