Talk:Peanut Corporation of America

The massive peanut-butter/paste recall has caused me to think about how foods are certified organic, and I belive there are some fundamental problems with how organic certification is done in the U.S, making corruption easy.

For example, going to the peanut-recall issue, some of the recalled items are organic food products (e.g. Cascadian Farm and Nature Path). In order for them to claim the products are organic, the peanuts in the must be organic. But those peanuts came from Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), the source of the salmonella recall.

One must assume that if peanuts came from PCA, and those peanuts are organic, some agency should have inspected the facility to insure that organic peanuts are not mixed with conventional peanuts. If such an inspection occurred, one would think that the inspector would have noticed the sanitation problems with the plant, raising such concerns to state/federal authorities.

Apparently, this did not happen. Therefore, what is the mechanisms in place that allows a company to label a food product organic? If companies were ignorant of the PCA sanitation problem, that implies they were ignorant of how they processed organic peanuts. What agency certified PCA for "organic-ness"?

Termigator 16:03, 21 February 2009 (EST)