Did your school stop serving peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Did your parents throw away your favorite snack bars? Has Fido been missing a favorite doggie treat? 

You may have heard that some products containing peanut butter are being recalled. When a food is recalled, it is taken off shelves at stores so people can’t buy it. If cafeterias have the recalled food, they are not allowed to serve it. If you have a recalled food item at home, you should not eat it or feed it to your pets.

the Salmonella bacterium under a microscope

So why are peanuts taking all the heat? Recently, some peanut products were found to contain the bacterium Salmonella Typhimurium. People can get very sick from salmonella.

But most people don’t have to worry. For starters, the contaminated peanut products were all made in one processing plant. That plant produced peanut butter in giant quantities for big cafeterias to use. The brands of peanut butter in smaller jars that you have at home are safe to eat.

Peanut products made in the plant were sent to other companies to be used to make many kinds of treats. Those foods, such as peanut butter crackers, snack mixes, cookies, granola bars, and even dog biscuits, have been recalled.  

Who decides what’s OK to eat and what’s not? The answer seems straight out of a TV crime show.

Tracking the trail
Food poisoning because of salmonella is just one of many illnesses that local health officials report to the government. That is so that when an outbreak occurs, investigators can quickly get to work to find the cause. 

Once the culprit is found and taken off shelves, a food-safety scare will usually slow down. But when sicknesses first start, it takes teams of experts time—and some hunting—to figure out what is to blame.

In November, reports of salmonella illnesses started coming in. At first, there were 13 cases. Two weeks later, there were 35. Food-safety sleuths at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at state labs across the country were already at work trying to find what was making people sick. Special tests showed that all those people had the same kind of salmonella infection.

Samples of suspected food and bacteria from the sick people were compared in a process called DNA “fingerprinting.” Those tests show whether the bacteria in the food and in the people are the same. In the case of the peanut butter, health officials in Minnesota figured out that people got sick from the same kind of salmonella. Then the health department in Connecticut found that same kind of salmonella in a container of peanut butter that hadn’t been opened until it was being tested in the lab. That meant the salmonella was in the container before it left the factory.

In the meantime, inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were already in the peanut-processing plant. The inspectors said they found that things weren’t as clean as they should be. They even charged, after examining the company’s records, that workers knew there had been signs of salmonella. By the time the FDA report came out at the end of January, the plant had stopped making peanut products and many of the recalled items had already been thrown away.

This isn’t the first time the food-safety system has solved a sickness related to foods. Similar teamwork tracked the cause of another salmonella outbreak in 2006 and 2007. No need to worry about another case going unsolved in the future. Not as long as the food-safety scientists are on the job!

Critical thinking question:
Why do you think it was important for the investigators to be sure about the source of the sicknesses?

Links:

Check with the Food and Drug Administration for product recall updates.

Learn more about peanuts from the National Peanut Board’s Buddy McNutty.