Don’t drink the peanut butter again. This is the second verse of a song we all sung along with ConAgra in May of 2007, and it goes something like this:
→ Today, our guardians at the Food & Drug Administration called what they’ve been up to lately a “major investigation” of peanut butter, stemming in part from an open 5-pound jar of King Nut Creamy found in a Minnesota nursing home, apparently oozing Salmonella Typhimurium, which sickened several residents.
→ Kellogg Co. isn’t acknowledging that it buys the cheap institutional stuff like King Nut, but nonetheless voluntarily “put a hold on any inventory in its control” of Austin and Keebler brand toasted peanut butter sandwich crackers and other similar goodies.
→ Houston Independent School District, which includes healthful sugary snacks made by certain elves in its school vending machines, was busy pulling Kelloggs peanut butter crackers on Thursday.
→ We don’t know yet what the big school districts out this way are doing with their spare peanut butter, but the Texas Department of State Health Services says six kids in Texas – two in Tarrant County and one each in Harris, Galveston, Travis and Willacy – have gotten sick from the same type of Salmonella attributed to 428 other cases in 43 states.
→ King Nut, of Solon, Ohio, has announced a recall of its peanut butter, for which its president said he was very sorry. However, his company doesn’t actually make the stuff, it buys it from Peanut Corporation of America.
→ Peanut Corp. waited three days and then decided to recall some of the peanut butter it makes for “bulk distribution” to institutions that one imagines would include prisons and schools and hospitals and nursing homes and the like, coming from a single processing facility in Blakely, Ga. That company’s president deeply regrets this happened.
→ Today, Peanut Corp. decided to expand the recall at its Blakely plant, after the FDA told the company “that new product samples in unopened containers tested positive for Salmonella,” said company President Stewart Parnell, who continues to “deeply regret that this product recall is expanding…”
→ As of this evening, the FDA wasn’t mentioning on its own web site what it told Mr. Parnell it had found inside the unopened giant bottles of peanut butter, but one supposes they’ll get around to it eventually, just as they eventually discovered that all those tomatoes contaminated with salmonella last summer were actually hot chile peppers.
