Published in The Beacon, April 24, 2007
(c) Leeuna Foster, 2007
"There she lay amidst the clutter
Killed 'stone-dead' by peanut butter."
What a pitiful epitaph. Imagine having those lines written on one's tombstone. Oh the humility of it all. Although I didn't actually die, I could have. I ate an entire jar of the "#2111" batch of peanut butter. It seems that certain jars were tainted with Salmonella. Folks began to get sick after eating the stuff. The outbreak appears to have started in August 2006. As a result of testing and recent case control studies, the Center for Disease Control was finally able to identify certain jars of peanut butter, bearing the lot number "2111", as the likely cause of the illness.
Thanks to the FDA who jumped right on the problem with the speed of a tortoise, we were alerted to the tainted peanut butter after only 300 cases of illness in 39 states and a mere six months. Their hasty actions were equaled only by FEMA 's response to Hurricane Katrina. And it came just hours after I had scraped the last bite of the peanut butter from the jar. I considered gagging myself the way some of those skinny models do whenever they lose their willpower and eat an entire Tic-Tac, but I figured the stuff had already digested...especially since I had been eating from the same jar for the past month. Although the lid was marked with the lot number beginning with "2111", I apparently got lucky and drew an untainted jar, or else I am immune to Salmonella food poisoning.
Is it just my opinion or does it seem that the food industry is having a bad decade? Birds got the flu, spinach got E-coli, tomatoes got ptomaine, cows went mad, ConAgra recalled more than 400,000 pounds of pasta and meatball meals that may have been under processed, shipments of honey from China contained a potentially harmful antibiotic (though according to the government reports, none of it ever reached the store shelves), peanut butter got Salmonella, and the dish ran away with the spoon.
This doesn't even include all the medications that have been recalled in the past few years due to chronic illnesses and deaths related to the use of the drugs. It almost makes one wonder if we as consumers should just stop consuming anything made by anyone other than ourselves.
But the proverbial straw came and broke the camel's back a few weeks ago when our pets began dying from tainted pet food. The melamine found in the pet foods was traced to wheat gluten imported from a company based in China's Jiangshu province.
Now you can poison me, but don't mess around with my dog. Wars have been started over less. I'm sure most people feel the same way. We're now afraid to feed them anything except our left overs. And if everyone eats like my family does, there aren't any leftovers left over after we finish a meal. So I have resorted to feeding my dog from the stash of venison in my freezer that remained from hubby's deer hunt last year. He (the dog) had a medium rare steak for breakfast and I made him a roast for supper. However, the meat won't last long at the rate he eats, so I will eventually have to take the risk and buy some dog food for him.
I am now looking to hire a dog food taster. I need someone to eat the dog food first and if they don't die, then I will know it's safe to feed it to my dog. I was really hoping to hire Donald Trump for the job but he is all involved with his reality TV show called, "Extreme Comb-over" or...whatever. Anyway, he probably would have fired himself within the first week. So now I will have to go with my second choice.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 76 million Americans are sickened, 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die each year because of something they ate. (or from looking at photos of Paris Hilton). According to an unnamed source, the FDA is making plans to change the labels on food containers to include the following warning: Caution. This product may contain E-coli, Salmonella, rat poison or other similar ingredients. Best if served with a stomach pump.
I need to go now. I have to phone Paris Hilton and ask her if she will be my dog food taster.
