Costco Dumps Peanut Butter in Land Fill

 Who Should Be Eating Contaminated Peanut Butter?

The scuttlebutt today is centered on the large membership shopping store Costco Wholesale, which will be dumping nearly a million jars of peanut butter in to a New Mexico landfill. 

The reason for such extreme measures is the food comes from a bankrupt peanut-processing plant that was at ground zero of a salmonella outbreak in 2012.   Costco Wholesale refused to receive shipment of the Sunland Inc. product and declined requests for it to be donated to food banks or sold to food supply institutions for prisons. 

So people are outraged and pointing fingers at Costco who has a proud reputation for how they treat employees.  So I'm pondering if it's better to pay $60K to dump the peanut butter and cover it with dirt or allow it to make any number of people sick, if it is in fact contaminated with salmonella.  Feeding prisoners the contaminated food might be a deserving punishment, but not food banks! 

My concerns are:

1.  If the peanut butter is dumped without being removed from the plastic jars, it may be discovered by a fleet of passing UFO's long after humans have vanished from the earth and will perhaps be recorded as the prime factor in the demise of human civilization.

2.  How in the name of reason did such a large salmonella contamination occur with Sunland Inc?

3.  It sure is a shame that entities like Sunland can file bankruptcy and escape any future obligation.
 
4.  If Costco allowed the peanut butter to be consumed and people got sick, guess who would be liable! 

America, Land of the Free?

 Beware of  Looking too Closely at Her Shadows

America, home of the brave and land of the free, but as you wander across this land of wide expanse and equal opportunity, don't go poking around too much or you might find some skeletons hiding behind her shadows.

And yes, Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant is getting all the attention and almost every day I see more warnings about eating pacific seafood or even surfing off the shore of California.   But what about the third largest nuclear disaster in world history that occurred in New Mexico?  Just less than 4 months after the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown in 1979, a spill at a uranium mill at Church Rock, New Mexico released 3 times as much radiation that eventually flowed in to the Puerco River. 

So I'm pondering how many U.S. citizens are aware of Church Rock as they are Chernobyl and Fukushima?  Maybe because it was located in the Navajo Nation where there are over 500 abandoned uranium mines with in their reservation? 

But travel a little further south to the great state of Texas, between Poth and Falls City and you will find miles and miles of drilling rigs, crude oil storage tanks and flares burning with trails of black smoke hazing the deep blue sky.   This area is the Eagle Ford Shale, 400 miles long, 50 miles wide, where gas and oil is extracted all the way to the Mexican border. 

Well, America must have her gasoline and as state Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, a Republican from Central Texas, so proudly proclaims: "I believe if you're anti-oil and gas, you're anti-Texas.”  

However like with Church Rock's uranium mill we citizens are desensitized to the health issues on humans and the environment.  I also ponder if we Americans are being molded into a bunch zombies who are no longer free thinkers.

I’m really pondering why we continue to pay out over $3.00 a gallon for gasoline and around the same amount for propane when we have so many resources?  Well, it's better to just go along, eat more Hot Pockets and listen to the latest breaking news, because zombies are immune to any pain or emotional discomfort.