Can anyone give me the low down on what the heck is going on with this peanuts recall?
The company did Very Bad Things with thousands of tons of chopped processed peanuts as well as other peanut products, and the FDA completely dropped the ball.
A truck of their product was rejected from Canada and then rejected coming back in to the US because the peanuts contained a "foul substance" and were unfit for human consumption, but the FDA mishandled it all and it sort of vanished. The company knew they had salmonella issues a while ago but kept shipping product.
Hundreds of people have gotten sick, a few people died, and everything that used their chopped peanuts and peanut butter, from vending-machine peanut butter crackers to boutique bars like Larabar and Balance and all those, peanut butter cookies in supermarkets, store brands of peanut butter that may have been produced by them, and institutional peanut butter have all been recalled. Millions of pounds of it.
It is expanding every day. Best advice is to avoid peanutbutter flavored products altogether, or only get local peanut butter definitely sourced from independently grown and locally shelled peanuts. I've taken to going to the healthy foods store, where they have the organic peanuts with their source marked that you can have made into peanut butter right there by their machine. :/
