Food Safety in Arizona: One Bad Apple --- or Peanut Rather --- Can Spoil the Whole Bunch
Food Safety in America Still Number One
By Kevin Rogers, Arizona Farm Bureau President
You may have noticed ongoing news coverage of The Peanut Corporation of America. The company at the heart of a nationwide outbreak of salmonella-tainted peanut products has shut down operations at its Texas facilities after authorities discovered the bacteria in its products there and at another facility in Georgia.
Tragically, eight people are dead and hundreds sick from salmonella poisoning and tons of products containing tainted peanut paste pulled from store shelves. The shock is that two processing plants from one company could wreak such havoc.
This recent violation of our food safety system should never have happened and it should’ve been stopped long before anyone became sick, let alone died.
If wrongdoing is found, the guilty parties should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Other victims will mount in this tragedy. From the grower standpoint, this will become a devastating financial loss for American peanut farmers. Peanut farmers in Georgia will tell you that they’re quite discouraged by this breach in the food chain by one bad processor. The incident gives everyone having anything to do with peanuts and peanut butter a black eye.
And, as The Peanut Corporation of America’s violations ruinously spill over, a big drop in demand for peanut products will occur. This happened more recently with the spinach scare.
In tough economic times, peanuts are an affordable protein source, but they’re also the bread and butter for a lot of farm families in the south. When E. coli was found in spinach and traced back to one small farm in California, it devastated the entire spinach industry that included parts of Arizona. Some produce farms are still trying to recover.
Peanut Corporation of America’s CEO, Stewart Parnell, appears to have possessed a cavalier attitude toward safety; as well as his company’s dodgy health record. Yet such behavior is the exception to the rule in the food industry, as the relatively rare examples of disease show. While this outbreak led to the biggest food recall in history because of how widely the ingredient had been distributed, it still makes up a tiny fraction of the 40,000 reported U.S. salmonella cases a year, most of which are caused by accidental contamination in home kitchens, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
As a result of how quickly Peanut Corporation of America has been brought to account, the best regulator is a market that ferrets out the reckless and flagrant violators. And while I don’t believe we need more government regulation, I do believe that the regulations that exist should be enforced.
All of us that enjoy peanut butter and peanut products should continue using these food products as the news and authorities tell us the tainted product have disappeared from store shelves. I will personally keep buying peanut butter for my family.
We put our future purchasing choices at risk when we overcorrect for one bad apple, in this case a peanut processer. The overcorrection by us avoiding peanut products could lead to peanut farmers going out of business. Then where does this vast, economical and healthy source of protein come from? Overseas?
American farmers and ranchers are feeding more than 300 million of us 365 days of the year, three times a day. Makes me hungry for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich just thinking about it. Food safety in Arizona is important to Arizona farmers and Ranchers!
Key Words: Food Safety in Arizona, Arizona Farmers and Ranchers, local Arizona agriculture, organic Arizona agriculture.
