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Subscribe to RSSThe salmonella outbreak linked to a New Mexico peanut supplier has expanded again with the voluntary recall of thousands of bags of whole peanuts by Hines Nut Co. The Dallas-based company recalled bags of salted jumbo Virginia in-shell peanuts on Monday for possible contamination with salmonella. The peanuts were processed by Sunland Inc. of Portales, N.M.
There are no reported illnesses from the Hines products.
Nearly 2 million pounds of peanuts are involved in the Hines recall, with the bags sold nationally in supermarkets such as Wal-mart and Dollar General stores. The salted jumbo peanuts were distributed from April 12 to Oct. 12, according to officials at the Food and Drug Administration.
The packing information begins with the words ‘BEST BUY’. The recall lot numbers are as follows, located on the fourth line of the ‘BEST BUY’ statement:
S03718, S03699, S03724, S03753, S03765, S03784, S03798, S03806, S03810, S03824, S03826, S03840, S03863, S03886, S03907, S03928, S03933, S03938, S03950, S03958, S03967, S03972, S03978, S03989, S03991, S04012, S04025, S04042, S04054, S04066, S04097, S04109, S04123, S04134, S04141, S04141, S04165, S04200, S04201, S04211, S04229, S04236, and S04247.
Consumers who have purchased the peanuts are urged not to eat them, but to return them to the place of purchase.
The Hines recall is the latest involving Sunland, which started as a peanut butter recall of jars sold to Trader Joe’s and now includes more than 240 peanut products.
At least 35 people in 19 states have been sickened in the salmonella outbreak traced to the Sunland peanut products. Nearly two thirds of those affected were children younger than 10, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The illnesses have been tied to those who ate Trader Joe's Valencia Creamy Salted Peanut Butter made with Sea Salt.
Sunland has ceased production and distribution from both its nut butter and peanut processing plants, FDA officials reported.
A full list of recalled products can be found here.
Salmonella can cause serious, possibly fatal infections, in young children, frail or elderly people, and those with compromised immune systems. Symptoms include fever, diarrhea (which may be bloody), nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain.
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Great! I just bought 2 packs of those for Sunday Funday and ate lots of them. SOB!
If you like eating poison, vote GOP often. They'll have vulture capitalist like Mitt selling snake oil if he wins.
Seriously Lance? Can you not stay on topic for 3 seconds? Are you going to blame that on Bush too?
Blake, sorry to hear about that. Hope it all comes out ok.
Tracy lives in the Fox Noose bubble. TFF!
Nice try lance, but you still fail. I don't look at fox news at all. Like NBC, CNN and other, they are extremist. Sorry short attention span theater is too long for you to stay on topic.
I see a POLITICAL TROLL is on the loose again! Lance, go find an article that is TRULY about politics to comment on.
Lance Johnson-5076203 - Perhaps a visit to First Read. There are plenty of folks there who would love to argue with you.
lance johnson-507...: if you would bother to check with the sec. of state corp division, of New mexico , you would, find that the Corp owners of the peanut processing plant are very big donors to the democratic party, greed has no political bounds.
the fda needs to shut down sunland - permanently. this is not the first time sunland has had a problem. what I can't figure out is how hard is it to keep your plant clean and how bad is it when in shell peanuts are contaminated.
SHUT SUNLAND DOWN
They do need to get serious about these plants. Too busy, understaffed, not enough funding.......
How do you mess up roasted peanuts in a shell? I can at least understand contamination with uncooked wet foods like lettuce and raw chicken, but how on God's great green Earth do you contaminate a dry cooked product in a non-edible shell? Are they passing raw meat over the conveyer belts before they send the peanuts through?! Sheesh!
I think the contamination actually comes from the growing process, not the processing. The fertilizers and "soil" are sometimes just refuse from another farm. Alternatively, if there is a situation like a flood or other disaster that contaminates the fields, there is little the workers can do to keep the debris and bacteria from contaminating what they're growing. This was the situation with the dirty spinach a little while back.
the terriorest's hard at work.
In situations like this salmonella can grow inside the plant. However, these peanuts are roasted. You roast at over 400 F. Salmonella is killed at 130 F if cooked for an hour. The time required to kill salmonella goes down exponentially as time increases. You could have a whole peanut with nothing but salmonella in it and it would be 100% killed in the time it took the peanut to warm up to 400 F. I just don't get it.
Pragmatic,
I completely agree, just to clarify, your line "The time required to kill salmonella goes down exponentially as time increases." Is that as the temp increases? You are spot on.
Should read the time required to kill salmonella goes down exponentially as temperature increases.
Thanks Prag, I was sure that was what it meant, but didn't want to jump to a conclusion on it. Thanks for lending intelligent insight.
Hines?
Enough is enough. I agree with the previous poster on shutting Sunland down or at least fining them so hard they go out of business and thus sending a message.
Hey let Bain take over problem solved:
LOL
My question is how do Virginia peanuts come from New Mexico.
They believe the salmonella was transferred via animal feces POST roasting. Roasted peanuts would have killed off any bacteria. So I can only imagine the environment these peanuts were stored if they can come in contact with rodent poo. Quite disgusting, and we want MORE deregulation?
"Manuel! Those are not the hog-feed peanuts, we put those roasted ones into the jars! Now scoop those back up, clean them off a bit, and into the jars!"
I've already eaten 2 and a half bags of whole roasted peanuts from the Hines co. It was only a possible contamination and I feel fine. Not to say that its not serious but I've had the nuts for about 2 weeks before the recall went into affect.
Must have been a big problem; organic and non-organic involved.
What I don't understand is you never, ever heard about salmonella until around the late 1990s. Back in the 70s and 80s you rarely ever had any sort of food recall. Are conditions just getting worse at these plants, or are we hyper-reactive now that news spreads instantaneously?
I believe it to be a combination of both. My money is on "conditions" due to low wages paid that only attract the poorly educated, lazy and/or uncaring workers that are hired by businesses interested only in production and profit in place of quality (which includes a healthy, safe product).
I did a quick search through the google news archives. There's plenty of food recalls over concerns of salmonella. In 1981 it was salami and roast beef. In 82 and 84 it was cheese. In 83 it was marijuana. In 85 it was milk. In 86 it was Baby Ruth candy bars. In 88 it was a restaurant. In 89 it was chickens and eggs. In 90 it was tomatoes. The dates are rough. The big difference I am seeing between these older cases and newer cases is the number sickened. Before it was thousands. Today it is usually hundreds or less.
The most obvious answer is media sensationalism. In the 80's and 90's, the media was only starting to sensationalize the news and news was becoming "entertainment." (Not to say that it wasn't sensationalized before, it's just really gotten out of control in later decades.)
I would believe the latter is mostly the situation. Also, the reporting of anything, no matter what it is, has grown and gets overblown with electronic media and social networking.
I will say however, your first item does raise a big question mark if it can be found to be true. How long have these plants been hiring large numbers of illegals and giving them false SSN's? Is there a correlation between the time when this practice started and when the numbers of incidents started to increase? Why then aren't these plants complying with Federal Standards, who is not getting to the inspections, or passing the inspections without being there? Do they "call-ahead" to set up inspection time (this is a practice in healthcare and food-service inspections that drives me flipping nuts)?
I do know for a fact that the large chicken and pork process plants in this area are almost completely illegals with a few legals and a very few skilled workers, this practice became common around here in the mid to late 90's. You almost literally can not get hired by them if you aren't skilled in plant ops, plumbing, electrical, hvac or machine repair if you are black or white. For line work you are practically required to be Hispanic or Vietnamese in origin.
@Dead Economy
Rather than blame the workers, consider this:
That group of workers that you describe is motivated to do the job the best that they can with the instructions given to them. They want the job and strive to perform their tasks to their understanding of what is required to keep it and do not wish to call attention to themselves for fear of losing the job.
Hence, if they are told that the most important part of their job is to keep the line moving, that is what they will do. No More - No Less - No Attention From The Boss.
This applies if whether the work is done in the US, Mexico, China, or any other country where overall management or any individual manager, in theory or practice, values cost containment more than product quality.
The flood of illegal alien invaders keeps getting worse and worse. These filthy diseased criminal aliens are contaminating our food supply. The Obama regime refuses to enforce the law. Even when illegals are self-identified in marches, the Obama regime won't round them up and ship them back to Mexico. Time for regime change.
So, what do they do with all the contaminated food? What do you do with tons of contaminated Peanut Butter in jars? How do they keep it from getting back into some foodchain. Send it to Haiti?
This is what happens when you hire mexican workers that take a crap and don't wash their hands.
What's up with the FDA, or do they still exist. Where's the early inspections, to detect these outbreaks. Seems this has been the food nightmare year, constantly something, peanuts, peanut butter, cantaloupe, dairy products, steroid injections, and on and on. Are these inspectors bought off. Hello anybody home.
"The Dallas-based company recalled bags of salted jumbo Virginia in-shell peanuts on Monday for possible contamination with salmonella. The peanuts were processed by Sunland Inc. of Portales, N.M."
If the peanuts did not come from Virginia, isn't that considered false advertising saying they were jumbo Virginia in-shell peanuts?
The FDA is slacking on their job to protect citizens in the US, I can only imagine what foods that come from China contan that we are not aware of. Yep, we have processed food made in China and shipped here, go look at your local frozen seafood section. Ever bought bagged frozen Talapia? Go see where it was Farmed and Processed? I've noticed most where I shop state Farmed and Processed in China, why do you think food labels don't say where the food was made? At one time, labels said Made in USA. Now labels say "Manufactured for" and the company name and their address, go to jiesworld(dot)com and look at the link for US Corporations in China. You'd be surprised to see what food manufacturers have opened up factories in China, how much of this food is shipped here for us to consume? Interesting huh? We are learning to can our own food now, buying only from local farmers and growers.
I just hope that Jif isn't involved. I'd really be SOL. I'd have to eat Skippy. Bad. What about all of the restaurants that have them to snack on while waiting for your order like Roadhouse or Five Guys just to name a couple?
funny lurch, but I will agree, skippy sucks
BTW, just got off phone with friend that works for Farm Extension office, he did in fact confirm that FDA inspectors set up in advance (minimum 2 weeks) of the date they will arrive for inspections. Also, the number of inspectors in this region has decreased by 20% while the workload has increased. Therefore, they don't even get to all inspections they are supposed to. I would guess that the ones they do make it to are rushed and are incomplete at best.
Noooo! Not my beloved goobers!
Virginia peanuts produced in Mexico. Guess I must have missed the geography lesson that day. Next we will have Georgia peanuts grown in Panama. Big companies continue to make it harder for smaller companies to survive when they chief criteria is cheap labor force to rely on keeping the cost down. No problem though, because our federal government will just solve the problem by paying the farmer in this country, to not grow any peanuts.
Some governments have no objections to turning their citizens into slaves. We have that annoying Bill of Rights, & Americans are such greedy, selfish, communists, they actually insist on being paid for their work.
Why is this happening? For the same reason it's always happened: Too many companies have abandoned the production of goods & services in favor of producing executive compensation & stockholder dividends.
This has been a significant feature of my life, & virtually everyone I know. We find supervisors who have to have us around because they don't know much about how to produce anything. Things had changed a lot since they were promoted.
Now those bosses have been replaced by young people with management degrees. They'll take lower salaries because they've never actually done a day's work in their lives. They know nothing about producing goods & services, but they can show how they reduced expenses (usually payroll) for the quarterly reports. They've improved cash flow by "effectuating synergy*", "actualizing empowerment*", & "consolidating diversification*".
If sales are down, cut payroll. That reduced expenses last quarter, & it'll do it again. Of course sales will be down next quarter too, because production is down. No problem, cut payroll again. The old death spiral into bankruptcy. Everyone gets fired, the assets are sold off, & these "successful" managers wind up running your company because of the excellent job they did.
*Phrases which mean nothing.
Spot on.
Please see my comment at 9.5 above. I believe our posts are complementary. You have described the overall situation to a higher degree.
That's how you get ahead. You say as much as possible without saying anything. "We need coparallel synergistic solutions-based sales-driven pipelines. Without a gap analysis of the ecosystem, we can be expected to up-sell the one to one service oriented operations without sacrificing top line growth. This will require a holistic paradigm shift of out of box knowledge process outsourcing to complete within marginal market effectiveness. We will continue our best practice scalable benchmark interfaces. This is our core competency."