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TAINTED PEANUT BUTTER WHATS HAPPENED?
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Owen Taylor
Posted 3/9/2009 10:49 (#637205 - in reply to #637056)
Subject: RE: TAINTED PEANUT BUTTER WHATS HAPPENED?



Mississippi

I'm not sure how the news media could actually know when things are safe again. Here's how I would look at it as an editor...

If a trade group or grower organization said things were safe again, I would have to ask myself, "But wouldn't they have said things were safe before this happened?" That problem with Peter Pan occurred just about two years before, and certainly people said peanut products were safe after that problem was suppose to have been cleaned up?

How can you prove now that they're safe to the point that either the media or the public would believe it?

I don't have a ready answer, I'm afraid. This is the kind of mess that an industry can't bounce back from quickly.

I noticed on the RSS feed just now that Canada's Food Inspection Agency on Saturday issued a warning about certain foods with PCA ingredients. There were further reports about shoddy inspection practices and policies, overall. Jenny Craig, the diet company, said today it was recalling more products with PCA ingredients.

This story will continue to unfold. Nobody is trying to punish farmers (or me, for that matter), but there's a desire to get to the bottom of this for whatever reason, with health safety being one of those reasons. As long as companies continue to recall these products, the public, the press or Congress will buy into the idea that we're out of the woods with this crisis.

After that there will have to be a "cooling off" period. God forbid anything worse should come along to supplant the story, but that would help distance peanuts from the spotlight. An example: A friend who's a Catholic theologian thanked me as an Episcopalian - kiddingly of course - for the fact that the Episcopal Church had accepted the ordination of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. That took the focus away from the sex scandals that were rocking the U.S. Catholic church, at least for a while. I'm not making light of anyone's faith or either denomination, but that's how things like this sometimes work.

The damage done to the peanut industry will linger for two or three years, provided nothing else drastic happens and provided the U.S. peanut industry, from farmers on up, lays its soul bare and takes whatever steps necessary to clean up this mess. As I've noted before, the peanut industry is so fragmented that I have only minimal faith in that happening.

For starters, I would study the almond model and see what the Almond Board of California did.



Edited by Owen Taylor 3/9/2009 13:03
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