Get this. Turns out a strain of salmonella in the most recent peanut butter outbreak — Salmonella Tennessee — is the same strain that got loose in the last peanut butter outbreak, and both Salmonellas came straight outa Georgia.
Predictably, the peanut processors blame Georgian farmers. The farmers blame the processors.
My problem with the article is the lack of examination on the farm end. Why didn’t the reporter talk to an actual peanut farmer producing on industrial scale, or, better, an agronomist specializing in ag pathogens? It seems rather irresponsible to cast aspersions on any group without consulting an expert in that field.
Without that, we have quotes from company shills and food safety talking heads making sheer guesses about farming practices. Is Salmonella Tenessee endemic to Georgia? Georgia farms? Was salmonella really activated by sprinkler systems irrigating peanuts as ConAgra suggests? Were peanuts in both cases actually purchased from Georgia farms?
Maybe. But in this article we largely have to take ConAgra’s word for such information, and you can imagine how El Dragón feels about that.
Worst of all, the discussion seems to be happening in a vacumm — not a word about the condition of the peanut processing plants owned by the company involved in the current outbreak.
It very well might be that some salmonella contamination is traceable to ag practices, but by the time we discover live birds and mouse poop in the food plant, we’ve moved past "blame the farmer," haven’t we?
