In case you missed it last week, the widespread outbreak of salmonella (Peanut butter and peanut paste manufactured by Peanut Corp. has been tied to the salmonella outbreak that has sickened 501 people in 43 states and is believed to have contributed to eight deaths) is tied to a plant in GA that knowingly and (it looks like) willfully shipped tainted peanut butter. They did this several times in the past few years. I say hang em high.

The guys on Wall Street may have done some things very wrong but knowingly putting lethal food in people they did not do. These folks in GA, if the facts hold, did this very thing.

Compare this to the legendary tainted Tylenol. Rather than risk anyone else getting hurt (they were pretty sure the tainted product was limited in scope and most officials thought it had all been found) they pulled every single jar of Tylenol from the shelves. There are many more details to this but you get the point.

Peanut Corp. knowingly kept pushing bad product into our food system. Tylenol removed all product (the vast majority of it good) from the system.

It has been said that integrity is what you do when nobody is looking. I guess we can now judge the integrity of Peanut Corp and from this perspective it is non-existent. This may not be the case, I am sure there are good people there. But somewhere, somehow people in management felt the pressure and they cracked. And they have tanked the entire peanut industry too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 1:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.