Letters: Food safety, now

Re “Safe peanut butter, and more,” Editorial, Nov. 29

As someone who has eaten several brands of peanut butter made at the now-shuttered Sunland Inc. plant in Portales, N.M., I easily could have been one of the 40-plus people sickened by the salmonella-tainted peanut butter the plant sent out.

The blame for not fully implementing last year’s Food Safety Modernization Act may rest with E. coli conservatives in the Republican Party, so-called because they’d rather see people infected with bacteria than see food companies regulated. It may rest with President Obama, whose pattern of truckling to corporate interests is, sadly, well established.

But it’s ironic that those who govern us constantly talk about the importance of protecting us from terrorism, yet they can’t or won’t protect us from food-borne disease.

The Food Safety Modernization Act needs to be fully implemented now, and politicians who stand in its way need to pay a price for doing so.

Jon Krampner

Los Angeles

Krampner is the author of the book “Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food.”

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