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Million Jars of Peanut Butter Dumped In New Mexico Landfill
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "The Guardian reports that a million jars of peanut butter are going to be dumped in a New Mexico landfill and bulldozed over after retailer Costco refused to take shipment of the peanut butter and declined requests to let it be donated to food banks or repackaged or sold to brokers who provide food to institutions like prisons. The peanut butter comes from a bankrupt peanut-processing plant that was at the heart of a salmonella outbreak in 2012 and although 'all parties agreed there's nothing wrong with the peanut butter from a health and safety issue,' court records show that on a 19 March conference call Costco said 'it would not agree to any disposition ... other than destruction.'
The product was tested extensively and determined to be safe. Costco initially agreed to allowing the peanut butter to be sold, but rejected it as 'not merchantable' because of leaking peanut oil. So instead of selling or donating the peanut butter, with a value estimated at $2.6m, the estate is paying about $60,000 to transport 950,000 jars – or about 25 tons – to the Curry County landfill in Clovis, where public works director Clint Bunch says it 'will go in with our regular waste and covered with dirt'. Despite the peanut butter being safe, Curry County landfill employee Tim Stacy says that no one will be able to consume the peanut butter once it's dumped because it will be immediately rolled over with a bulldozer, destroying the supply. Stacy added more trash will then be dumped on top of the pile. Sonya Warwick, spokeswoman for New Mexico's largest food bank, declined to comment directly on the situation, but she noted that rescued food accounted for 74% of what Roadrunner Food Bank distributed across New Mexico last year. 'Access to rescued food allows us to provide a more well-rounded and balanced meal to New Mexicans experiencing hunger.'"
The product was tested extensively and determined to be safe. Costco initially agreed to allowing the peanut butter to be sold, but rejected it as 'not merchantable' because of leaking peanut oil. So instead of selling or donating the peanut butter, with a value estimated at $2.6m, the estate is paying about $60,000 to transport 950,000 jars – or about 25 tons – to the Curry County landfill in Clovis, where public works director Clint Bunch says it 'will go in with our regular waste and covered with dirt'. Despite the peanut butter being safe, Curry County landfill employee Tim Stacy says that no one will be able to consume the peanut butter once it's dumped because it will be immediately rolled over with a bulldozer, destroying the supply. Stacy added more trash will then be dumped on top of the pile. Sonya Warwick, spokeswoman for New Mexico's largest food bank, declined to comment directly on the situation, but she noted that rescued food accounted for 74% of what Roadrunner Food Bank distributed across New Mexico last year. 'Access to rescued food allows us to provide a more well-rounded and balanced meal to New Mexicans experiencing hunger.'"
In this litigious society, who can blame them. You can damn near guarantee that they'd have hit one bad jar in a lot that large and gotten the tar sued out of them. If you want to fix this situation and make sure it never happens again, demand tort reform in this country.
The company shut down in 2012. These were produced prior to the company's closure. This is probably not safe for human consumption at this point.
Consumer peanut butter's got a shelf life of roughly a year or two at most, generally. This stuff is on the edge of that point, if not past. A million jars of peanut butter being donated would probably sit on the shelves in a home being eaten over the course of a few months, which definitely puts it past the point where the peanut oil may begin going rancid -- and that's not accounting for all the jars that will sit in storage, probably for months if not years, waiting to be given out.
Donated food is usually donated because something was mislabelled or a pallet came loose and it wasn't suitable for sale due to damage to the container that doesn't jeopardize the product itself. This has been in storage for years. This is not suitable for donation, this is a bunch of jerks trying to make themselves look good and try to drum up donations while making a company that HAS given them donations in the past look bad because they're not giving them donations right now.
E.T. loves his peanut butter pieces...
... then the news and legal worlds would turn on Costco like a pack of rabid dogs. Yes, this destruction of nutritious food seems like a terrible, horrible waste; but if there's even a chance that one single jar is tainted with salmonella, and someone gets sick, then the tone would change in a heartbeat to "heartless corporation knowingly rids itself of poisoned food". I can't blame them for playing it safe.
Well, at least all of the Atari E.T. cartridges now have an accompanying snack food.
million jars of peanut butter
Jars of peanut butter come in many different sizes. Could you please convert the amount to Olympic Sized Swimming Pools?
Thanks.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
Clinton signed the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Emerson_Good_Samaritan_Act_of_1996
So no legal reason no to donate food.
Dumping $2.6 million worth of editable food when there are people starving is shocking to most of us. Yet, this is a reflection of our current law suit happy society.
Most of us has very little to loose and most food banks has very little to loose so our local food bank gladly take in our donated food items and we happily go on with our lives do what we can for people who are starving, one canned food at a time. Also, I've volunteered at the local food banks and base on what I've seen, Costco peanut butter is probably an upgrade to the various expired high fructose laden supermarket rejects.
Life is very different for our newly anointed fellow big corporate beings. In their billion dollar world, with their million dollar lawyers, somewhere, somehow, the meaning of starving people became irrelevant. After all, corporations do not understand the physical pain of starvation.
Peanut Butter landfill time....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"All parties agreed there's nothing wrong with the peanut butter from a health and safety issue" isn't legally binding on anyone who might later decide to sue the company. At best it might make lawsuits harder depending on what the exact liability rules are. Furthermore, even if they win the lawsuit, fighting one will cost money and bad publicity, especially when the newspapers can use the spin "it's from a plant that was condemned for salmonella poisoning, how irresponsible can this megacorp be?"
If they give away the peanut butter, they stand to lose quite a bit with nothing to gain except a little good publicity (said good publicity going down the toilet if anyone actually sues).
There's a law that avoids liability for food donation:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-104publ210/pdf/PLAW-104publ210.pdf
The article summary does a good job of making it sound like Costco is the unreasonable bad guy in this, but every story has two sides. Why is Costco insisting on destroying the peanut butter?
Is it to avoid claims for payment on the shipment from the bankruptcy estate? Is it fears for later liability? Is it, as the summary tries very hard to imply, sheer obstinate evil?
If you're not going to even attempt to hide your bias, why even bother?
Assuming you're right, that may work in the courts. With a judge. That definitely won't matter with the court of public opinion and probably wouldn't work with a jury.
What "all parties have agreed to" for the narrow purpose of settling a bankruptcy suit is not the same thing as "accepting legal responsibility for the charitable distribution of perishable foods that have been in storage for a minimum of two years."
If you want to ignite a food riot in a school or prison, serving rancid peanut butter is as good as any place to begin.
Are people the only animals that consume peanut butter? Can't this be converted to biodiesel or something? I understand the concern for human illness, but aren't there other options?
Why is this going to landfill - how backward is that? Who does landfill anymore? That stuff is full of oils and proteins. It could be turned into biodiesel or put into a furnace to generate heat and electricity.
How's the decision to destroy it working in the court of public opinion?
This sort of thing has happened before, and it will happen again. An even better example was when the MV Cougar Ace almost sank, and 4700 brand new Mazda cars hung at a 60 degree angle for several months. They never moved, and they were all in seemingly perfect condition.
Mazda chose to err on the side of caution, rather than risk a lawsuit. Or even worse, there was a very valid concern that they would become "Katrina Cars". A coat of paint, and they would be bundled up and sold in some other unsuspecting country. (On a side-note, the destruction process is really cool!.)
With waivers not being worth the paper they're printed on, it's simply not worth the risk of getting sued.
And finally, there's the "soft damage" to take into consideration? Remember the kid in preschool who "had cooties"? That kid KEPT those cooties, right up until graduation day in high school. Costco might never allow a single jar to hit their normal distribution system, but just the simple fact that the peanut butter even exists at all, is a risk that someone, somewhere, will say, "Whoa, Costco peanut butter might have salmonella."
Play "Telephone" with that for a while, and suddenly Costco can't pay someone to take a jar of peanut butter. This is actually a very safe, very beneficial tactic for Costco.
Now consumers can be absolutely guaranteed that they will never have to think about whether Costco peanut butter is safe.
And in retail, that's money in the bank.
[End Of Line]
Ok so maybe nothing can be done with the peanut butter but that sounds like alot of glass or plastic that could at least be recycled.
The underlying story may be this:
1) We don't know what actually happened between Costco and the testing facilities and suppliers. Even though samples were tested, there could be a concern that there were problems in the food that was not tested. Costco has not handled the public relations about this incident in a sensible manner: Costco officials did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
2) Costco has become poorly managed since James Sinegal is no longer CEO.
Ten years ago, Costco was wonderful. It was easy to make decisions about buying anything we saw at Costco, because someone else had been careful to stock only reputable products, products that people would buy if they had done serious research. Now we have to do our own research.
Costco employees still praise James Senegal. They sometimes criticize the poor quality of items that Costco now stocks.
Why on Earth do you think that the appropriate way to punish the bigwigs making these decisions is to make the employees' lives harder?
Goes back a lot farther than 20 years -- there's a passage in The Grapes of Wrath that talks about perfectly good produce being destroyed in order to prop up prices:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Please don't do this Costco will not be affected by it, you'll just be inconveniencing and aggravating the staff who will have to restock them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In true Slashdot spirit, I've only read the summary, but even that was enough to tell me that Costco is doing the right thing here.
The jars are not sealed. They might test OK now, but by the time the food banks get through the stock, who knows what organisms have made the jar their home.
They don't. If a corporation makes profit, they pay taxes.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Even though samples were tested, there could be a concern that there were problems in the food that was not tested.
There is actually a principle in the regulation of food and pharamceuticals that you can't "test quality into a product."
You build quality into a product by controlling the manufacture, and testing really just serves as a confirmation that all went well.
There is no way to sample peanut butter such that you can be certain that there isn't a microbe in the part of the peanut butter you didn't test. Now, you can make that risk fairly low as you sample more and more, but if there was reason to suspect the integrity of the product in the first place then you can imagine the lawyers lining up.
And, as others pointed out, if they give away product for free they still face liability, make no money, and potentially undercut their own sales. If some poor guy dies of salmonella you can imagine the tales of a company feeding them peanut butter that they'd already determined isn't good enough for ordinary people...
and
What's wrong with this picture?
Africa, the continent in need of this kind of aid, refuses to take even GMO food aid:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/afr...
Which is eminently safer than whatever's in this peanut butter.
It's often been said: The world doesn't have a food shortage problem. It has a distribution problem.
African, one of the most famine stricken places on earth has 60% of the worlds uncultivated arable land.
http://philmatibeceo.wordpress...
In the U.S. where food is plentiful, we end up throwing food away if it's even remotely suspect of carrying sickness.
It makes perfect sense to me.
Except that the tale is incorrect.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pl...
Futurist Traditionalism
Quite. People are ready to lynch Costco for applying some sort of standards to what they will buy and put on the shelf. They will reject things that Walmart will happily accept. This is by no means the first time. This is probably not the first pile of food to be "wasted" because Costco chose to err on the side of safety.
I can understand why they simply don't want to be associated with the listeria outbreak factory. It boggles my mind that ANY ONE here wants to push the issue.
Even if they've tested this stuff, I would still be suspicious of it just because of where it came from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
While we're at it, why don't we donate our damaged or defective food products to a local food bank (only if we don't want it ourselves because of potential poisoning issues, and only after a small random sample shows only quality related issues). Hey, I'm not going to eat it because it isn't good enough for me, but it's good enough to give to charity, after all.
The issue here isn't that CostCo is being numb, the issue is that people can sue CostCo if they claim to be sick from the peanut butter. Even if the food bank gives it away, and the person that gets it gives it away, the chain is still there, and CostCo is still in the sights of a plaintiff as a target for a suit.
This is pretty much why railroads will shred brand new cars if they were in a derailment. It's easier accounting to pay the manufacturer for the car than to risk 100,000 or more in liability because the car "might have been" damaged in the derailment leading to the suit. Hmmm. $40K for the car an know that's the end of it, or risk potentially $100K+ payouts for decades after from someone that might not even be born yet? It's simple math.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Back in the day (1980s), I helped run an emergency food pantry in Southern California. At the time, Sol Price (founder of Price Club, which I believe is one of the constituent chains that merged to become CostCo) donated pallets of dried milk to us to redistribute. In general, these were pallets where there had been damage, so some of the packages were not usable - the vast majority of the packages, however, were fine.
At our pantry, that donation made up a substantial part of what we gave out to people, especially those with children.
I always thought it was both generous and great business sense for them to donate that food. After all, Price Club got a tax write off, there was less waste, and the hungry people got food without it impacting Price Club's sales.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I can understand why they simply don't want to be associated with the listeria outbreak factory. It boggles my mind that ANY ONE here wants to push the issue.
I can't understand why they want to dump this organic material in a landfill with other random trash.
Even if it's unfit for human consumption --- it can still be used as an energy source or fertilizer, due to the valuable raw nutrients contained in peanuts.
Obviously it never got to the point of a large number of blankets. If you scroll down the page to the conclusion I linked to you'll see
Trent's entry for May 24, 1763, includes the following statement: ... we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.
Along with reports that by the following spring smallpox was raging amongst them.
As for the Church, as recently as the '50's if not more recently (Church ran residential schools only ended in the '90's) the Government of Canada along with the Church were doing medical experiments and dietary experiments on the native population in the residential schools. Generally, to judge by their actions the Church has not considered the natives to be human. The government is being very reluctant to be transparent about the issue. Of course our government is like yours, voted in on promises of transparency and probably the most opaque government ever. only difference is they're Conservative.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic... is one link, Google has lots more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Be it future generations on archeological digs or some other entity examing our time, doubtless the future will see this as one of the dark ages. The waste alone is shamefull. I understand Costco's move, if they are worried about litigation, but wasted food always makes me feel bad. I wish there was a better way to dispose of this, or perhaps avoid disposal altogether. If we had more local businesses, food producers, and farms--then perhaps mega-food production would not be needed. The place I go to for peanut butter, crushes the penuts in a machine right in front of me. About as fresh as it gets with no added salts, oils or preservatives. An independnt shop run by an old lady that sells dried foods, nuts, olives, spices, and such. No waste in this sort of place. We need more of this and less of Costco.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Other /.ers have covered the issues around the peanut butter well enough. What no one has mentioned is the continued idiocy of landfills in the US. Why doesn't the US incinerate? You get energy out of the trash, destroy poisonous chemicals, recover the metals, and at the end you have a much smaller volume of waste that needs to be disposed of.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Isn't dumping so much of an edible in one location just eventually going to attract a large vermin population?
Well, somehow I kinda doubt that working for Costco is a career choice where you really have a lot of option if you don't really like it there...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then sell it as livestock feed. Pigs eat far worse than peanut butter. Boil it up along with the rest of the slops to kill off any salmonella, and it'll be perfectly safe (if disgusting, from a human point of view).
Still a waste of perfectly good human food, but at least it's better than burying it with the trash.
And it is pretty much guaranteed hat someone is going to get one of these jars and suddenly develop some tummy ache and report directly to the lawyers.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust