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Can Organic Peanut Butter Still Have Salmonella?
Organic products are safer because they're better for the land and better for the people that consume them, right? Well, yes and no. The "USDA Organic" label doesn't necessarily mean that the foods have been inspected for pathogens or their carriers. After all, the Texas and George processing plants to which the contaminated peanut butter was traced carried that organic label.
What exactly does organic mean, then? Is it worth the extra cost? Read It’s Organic, but Does That Mean It’s Safer? from the NYT.
It's important, though, to see the supervision failures in the peanut plants as reflecting more upon the food supervisory bureaucracy than the organic concept itself. The Organic Consumer's Association has a slightly different view of the issue:
Beyond safeguarding our own growing and handling procedures, a major problem is that no field, greenhouse, garden, packing shed or processing kitchen is an island – even the most secure operations are open to outside vectors and as the scale of the enterprise increases, the problems multiply. And even though organic standards have many extra food safety standards for certified growers to comply with – including audit trails, no fresh manure use on crops, strict composting parameters and requirements for regularly testing the farm’s water supplies – organic growing per se is clearly not immune to food contamination problems.
The OCA also has a petition to the USDA asking them to improve the transparency of their organic certification processes.
Tags: Contaminant, Health, Organic, Peanut, Processing, Salmonella
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