Salmonella And Blood Of The Innocent
I’m sure you’ve all heard that there’s another salmonella outbreak occurring, this time centered squarely on peanut butter. At the moment more than 125 products are thought to have been tainted. Everything from granola bars to pet food is to be suspect. In fact, warning signs like these were plastered all over the grocery story this weekend:
Those darn Keebler elves, coping a squat in the peanut fields again simply because they don’t have the decency to drudge the 100 yards to the mobile elf-sized port-a-potty that trails them wherever they go.
But in all seriousness, with our modern technology, cleanliness standards and oversights, why does this still happen? This time around the outbreak has sickened at least 453 people in 43 states and has thought to have caused the death of six people. What really angers me is that the FDA has known about this particular outbreak since September of 2008. That’s four months of this inept agency sitting on their collective asses, and the strongest action they’ve taken is to issue “voluntary” recalls.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
[HermanTurnip takes a long, slow, deep breathe]
Putting my anger and resentment aside for a moment here, I did find something I found a bit peculiar tucked away amongst the vast array of modern-day cleaning products and accruements:
I’m trying to decipher exactly what they’re trying to tell me here. Are they saying that All can spirit away any and all child-sized bloodstained handprints from any fabric surface? Following that logic, what’s with the protein and urine handprints? Am I supposed to infer that a small group of children ran afoul of everything that is good and decent, soaking their hands in various bodily fluids and marking their territory like a rabid pack of wild dogs, thus requiring the necessity of All to clean up the macabre mess? More importantly, should I be concerned that that’s the thought that this product conjured up in my addled hunger-stricken mind this afternoon while shopping for braunschweiger and potato bread?
