Corduroy Orange

From a 4-paragraph brief on page A-10 of yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

ConAgra Foods Inc. has extended its recall of all peanut butter produced at a plant in Georgia by more than a year, back to October 2004, the Food and Drug Administration said Friday.

The recall covers all Peter Pan peanut butter and all Great Value peanut butter beginning with product code 2111, including peanut butter toppings

Food borne illnesses are messy things and often difficult to trace back to their origins; usually outbreaks tend to be traced back to things that are more apt to display a risk: oysters, ground beef, and improperly handled chicken. Peanut butter normally does not rank high on the list.

That the peanut butter has been implicated and that the recall extends back more than two years leaves me wondering, what were the conditions at the plant that produced this peanut butter? Why is it that the equipment wasn’t cleaned and sanitized more recently than 2004? Any establishment preparing food for widespread public consumption should have better control over the cleanliness of their equipment in order to reduce the likelihood of cross contamination.

I don’t have any of this peanut butter on my shelf. I rarely eat processed peanut butter; it tastes extremely sweet to me. I used to think that processed peanut butter’s flavor and texture were great when I was a kid and my parents were getting natural peanut butter for our family. Now, I’ve come full circle to realize that processed peanut butter only vaguely resembles something derived from a peanut. Now, I very much prefer the fresh ground peanut butter. I put a jar under the machine at my local Food Co-Op, press a button, and the burr grinder processes peanuts into peanut butter as I watch.

This isn’t to say that peanut butter is necessarily immune to an outbreak of salmonella, but it is to say that were there to be a tainted shipment of peanuts that got in there, the scope of the outbreak would be greatly reduced by means of its extreme locality; any recall would affect a limited number of consumers in the greater Pittsburgh area. Cleaning and sanitizing the equipment could be accomplished with extreme efficiency, and the effects would be extremely minimal at most. Centralization of our food supply leads to a monumental compunding of problems when an issue does arise. Shopping, eating, and living locally leads to a safer food supply.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Sustainable Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.