Salmonella bacteria live in animals' intestinal tracts. The WSJ says kill the bug with public disapprobation — not prevention.
In February 1906 — 103 years ago — the muckraking writer and Socialist politician, Upton Sinclair, Jr., published The Jungle. He dedicated the novel "TO THE WORKINGMEN OF AMERICA". For you see he penned the book to educate Americans on "the inferno of exploitation" that plagued factory laborers (usually poor immigrants) at the turn of the 20th century. He chose the meatpacking industry as the villainous user and abuser and the Chicago Stockyards as the central setting.
But his shot misfired. "I aimed at the public's heart," he said, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach." He meant that the Sturm und Drang of his characters should have upset Americans about labor conditions but that the muckraking masterwork horrified people about the stuff that goes into meat products.
Consider this passage from Chapter 9 of The Jungle:
It seemed that they must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on "whiskey-malt," the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called "steerly" — which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man's sleeves wer smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was stuff such as this that made the "embalmed beef" that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.
The attention that The Jungle brought to the unsanitary, noisome, and disgusting conditions led to passage of Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
The Peanut Corporation of America has burst into the public's imagination as the latest analogue to the vile meatpackers of The Jungle. Its Blakely, Georgia, goober processing plant has so far killed nine people and sickened 637 more in 44 states. The PCA facility shipped peanuts and peanut products that teemed with salmonella bacteria, which causes salmonellosis, typhoid fever, and paratyphoid fever in humans. PCA also ran a peanut factory in Plainview, Texas, for four years without a state license.
Blawgletter intuited a connection between Chicago slaughterouses and peanut rendering plants when we spotted an editorial on February 18 in The Wall Street Journal. The item, "Peanut Butter Justice", ends with a panagyric to the all-wise and self-correcting market. It says:
The best food-safety enforcement tool is the one now being wielded against PCA and Mr. Parnell in the form of corporate self-destruction. Their fate should be chastening to any company inclined to play fast and loose — and will do more to enforce food safety standards than any army of inspectors.
Hmm. The solution to death-dealing, disease-spreading behavior consists in . . . self-regulation plus public humiliation and financial ruin when it fails?
Leaving to one side the editors' elision of the key role of regulators and Congress in making PCA pay a price and the unbelievable asinity of PCA's response to the public health crisis it caused, how do the editors explain the fact that PCA weathered similar charges at least twice before? And do they believe "food-safety enforcement" should depend on whether the guilty party fails to keep its misdeeds out of the newspapers?
Update: Someone — whose name I won't mention — points out that the WSJ editorial didn't denounce regulation. Indeed:
It simply argued that the company's bankruptcy, plus pending civil lawsuits (one would think you'd be cheered to see the WSJ in favor of consumer class actions for once!) and criminal charges sent a more salutary message, and would create a better enforcement/regulatory environment under continued FDA supervision (whose obvious failure the article mentions but you do not) than the new, hyperactive super-enforcement regime that Rep. DeLauro reportedly champions.
