Outbreak

Listeriosis. I'd never heard of it until last week, and when I did first hear the word, I thought it was a disease you got from drinking too much mouthwash.
I know better now, believe me.
There are three classes of food recall. Class III recalls are--well, they're not really "voluntary", no recall is, but they're not terrifically concerning. (Which is not to suggest they're ignored.) These recalls are quite common: we usually see at least one a week. In a typical Class III, something got into a batch of--let's say ice cream, that's the last one I had--and spoiled the flavour. It's a QA thing: the company requests we pull the product, not because it poses any kind of health issue, but because somebody might bring it home, have a wee taste and go bleccccchhh.
Class II recalls are actually fairly common as well--about one a month, give or take. Typically the culprit here is nuts: some nuts got into a batch of something that's not supposed to contain nuts. In this day and age when it seems like every tenth person can smell a nut and keel over dead, when you get a Class II, you hustle ass.
When you see a Class I--and you don't see them too often, thank God--you drop what you're doing, page everybody who isn't actually dealing with a customer and instruct them to drop what they're doing--and you pull the product immediately. You scour the store for product that may have been displaced. You look EVERYWHERE. And when you gather all that product up and get it the hell off the sales floor, do you throw it out? No you do not, even though our Dumpster is inaccessible unless you want to crawl through a compactor. You put the product in a sealed box and mark it POISON on every side and you store it well away from anything and everything. A rep from whatever company's been afflicted with the Class I comes and takes the stuff away.

This Maple Leaf Foods recall is the biggest Class I I've ever seen. And the damn thing keeps growing. It seems like every day there's another twenty things to scour the store for. (You'd like to think you won't find tainted deli meat behind the cereal, but customers seem to delight in surprising us that way.)

Ten people dead so far.

On the news a couple of days ago, they mentioned a convenience store owner who was reassuring his customers they had nothing to fear in his store: "We don't sell any Maple Leaf products," he said. "We only sell Schneider's."
Now I don't expect the average customer to know that Maple Leaf bought JMS Schneider five years ago--but I'd demand a store manager know that sort of thing. Mind you, it's not an easy thing to keep track of. You'd be surprised how few companies are responsible for the myriad of brand names on grocery store shelves. And often it's beastly hard to determine who actually manufactures your store brand. It's not usually stated on the label.

And it should be. A lot of things should be on the label that aren't.

I really feel a great deal of pity for Maple Leaf Foods. After that one, colossal mis-step, they've done everything, and I mean everything, right. Most companies don't: they either dodge responsibility or accept it grudgingly, and their chief concern remains the bottom line. Not so Maple Leaf. They found two contaminated products and recalled 220. They put 180 people on phone lines to respond to consumer concerns. They immediately retained a third party company to determine what went wrong. Their plant is still closed.

The lawsuits are going to kill them. Negligence hasn't yet been determined, but the lawsuits are going to kill them.

Our federal government is at least partly culpable here. That the Conservatives would want America to adopt a more lenient inspection regime is questionable at best. That this news should break in the middle of a listeriosis outbreak is rather damning, to say the least. I think Stephen Harper would be wise to rethink the election call he seems to be about to make.