I know Doug has some beef with peanut butter. He’s got every right to avoid the foods he can’t trust to keep his family healthy.

I, on the other hand, have a great relationship with peanut butter. It’s the nutrition that keeps me in. Once, for a high school project, I served a church full of friends and family a slew of dishes made with peanut butter and then told them how they were being saved from heart disease, breast cancer, and diabetes with those delicious monounsaturated fats and a low glycemic index.

This was after writing a 20-page paper on the nutritional excellence of the dietary staple. (Elizabeth Weise of USA Today called it a “sandwich spread”, but that’s entirely too limiting… maybe even offensive.)

Nutrition, however, is no consolation to people sickened by Salmonella contamination. Barfing (or even barfing potential) can turn anyone against a food pretty fast.

That would be why it was so important for the companies involved to start talking to consumers at the first sign of a connection between sick people and King Nut peanut butter.

King Nut Companies was first up, making it abundantly clear that the peanut butter in question “is NOT manufactured by King Nut,” but is merely distributed by them.

In another release, King Nut explained,

“Before distributing peanut butter, we require certification from our supplier that the product has been tested and is safe.”

While that fact relieves them of some responsibility, it does NOT remove all of it. Acquiring food from safe sources is expected of the company with their name on the jar.

Sheesh.

I felt a little more love coming from Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), who manufactured the peanut butter. Their press release opened with an expression of “deep concern about the apparent finding of salmonella in a container of one of its products.”

PCA’s statement went on to explain,

“PCAs facility and products are frequently and rigorously tested for salmonella and other microbiological contamination, including hourly sampling during processing and subsequent analysis by an outside, independent laboratory. No salmonella has ever been found in any of PCAs product.”

The public disclosure of product and environmental sampling is important in good risk communication. I hope to see more of this as the investigation into the source of the contamination continues.