Peanuts!

You may have heard about the peanut product recall. Hundreds have been sickened and 9 people have died from products containing peanuts contaminated with Salmonella. The contaminated peanuts came from a PCA (Peanut Corp. of America) plant in Georgia. The PCA supplies peanut products in bulk to other companies who use them in various products or to food service companies, such as Cliff Bars, Keebler, Kraft, etc... Apparently they knew about the salmonella and shipped the peanut products anyways. Since the food stuffs are generally shipped between the states and affect people in multiple states congress has authority under the interstate commerce clause of the constitution to regulate food safety. To this end the Oversight and Investigation Sub-Committee of the Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the cause, results and system failures of the salmonella outbreak. Congressman Walden is the Ranking Republican Member on the sub-committee and had a really great opening statement. Both of these articles have more information on the situation and the CNN article includes a video of the congressman- BBC Article CNN: Story and Video

I helped pack a couple props down to the hearing and at one point during the congressman's opening statement held up a poster of one of the PCA internal company emails that showed the presidents disregard for consumer safety. I sat right behind the congressman through almost all of the hearing. In the BBC article above you can see a picture of the congressman, that is my ear off his left shoulder.

Here are more pictures of the hearing, I've gotta give a big shout-out to my homeboy Nathan Rea for taking all these pictures:


We heard from several "witnesses" who were affected by the salmonella outbreak, one of them was from Oregon. His son had gotten salmonella from peanut butter crackers, but they didn't realize it so he kept eating the crackers...bad news... Fortunately he survived, the other two witnesses weren't so lucky; each one lost a parent to the salmonella outbreak. The company president came but did not answer any questions, invoking his 5th amendment rights. The video on CNN has the congressman asking the president of the company if he would like to try some of the products that contain his peanuts...he declined to answer.

This style of hearing is really something; it starts with each member of the subcommittee giving an opening statement. These basically allow each member a moment in the spot light to get their opinion on record. By the end of opening statements the dead horse of PCA being evil and people being harmed was thoroughly beaten. After opening statements the first panel was introduced. The first panel consisted of several of the victims relatives. Again the main point was that someone really screwed up, the loved ones were harmed, and we need to get some kind of better food safety regulations in place. Because this panel were relatives of the victims when the committee asked them questions they were mainly establishing the amount of harm inflicted, and the congressmen/women took the opportunity to add to some commentary to their opening statements. In 5 minutes of "questions" per congressman, realistically only 1 or 2 questions were actually asked, and it wasn't because the panel took a long time answering.

The second panel was the company president and one of his top executives. This was a very brief panel because neither of them presented opening testimony or answered any of the questions- invoking their 5th amendment rights. The top exec looked like he was having a crappy day- which he was- at a couple points he even looked ready to cry. Its something to think about- doing business one day and the next being hauled in front of congress to answer for your sins.

The third panel consisted of "experts", an FDA inspector, a Georgia food safety inspector, two people who test food samples and a medical doctor. This was really where the meat of the testimony was. The two lab reps (each different labs) had actually tested peanut product for salmonella from PCA and got positive results. There were many questions regarding the laboratories roles, food safety in general, reporting lab results, inspections, etc... At this point the congressman had to slip out and after sitting for several hours I was not sad to follow him out.