Lauri Ann's New Life

Another salmonella outbreak causing death and sickness everywhere and it's not due to some foreign country but once again, our own plants here in the US.

I noticed we're out of peanut butter as I write this. Trying to do a little research as to which ones were not recalled first pointed me in the direction
Peter Pan peanut butter. They have taken out a pay-per-click ad plus an ad in print with a coupon, to alert consumers that they are not part of the recall. That's all well and good until I looked up ConAgra foods (which to me anything that tells us up front it's a con probably is). It appears they recalled Peter Pan themselves for salmonella back in 2007. Do I think they learned anything from that and trust that their plant is spotlessly clean? Probably not, at least not enough to go buy Peter Pan.

Another peanut butter not on the recall list is Jif, owned by Smuckers. I had switched from Skippy (also not on the list) to Jif awhile back as they are one of the few commercial peanut butters that also don't use high fructose corn syrup. I don't care what they try to tell you in TV commercials, high fructose corn syrup is not a good thing, but that's an article for another day.

It's amazing to me the top food producers whose food has been included in the recall. Nestle, Famous Amos, Little Debbie, just to name a few. If you would like to see the full list, they have it on the FDA website. It's pretty shocking how far reaching it is. A lot of the foods we buy under our grocery store's brand (Whole Foods, Trader Joe's) have also been recalled because they used the peanut paste in their products.

I guess the only "safe" food is food we grow or process ourselves, but even that's not necessarily true. They say to kill salmonella food has to reach a temperature of 140-165 degrees but how many people really use a thermometer while cooking? How many people freeze food thinking that will kill the bacteria. For now I guess I'll protect myself the best I can and hope they hire more inspectors at the FDA.