Peanut Corporation Of America

Peanut Corp. of America, the company that produced the contaminated peanut butter now being widely recalled, lied to Food and Drug Administration investigators about shipping batches of the food known to be tainted with salmonella bacteria, the agency said Friday. The company had previously told the FDA that some lots of peanut butter had initially tested positive for the bacterium, then were retested and found to be negative before they were shipped.

David James recalled opening a container of peanuts at the processing plant here and seeing baby mice. "It was filthy and nasty all around the place," said James, who worked in shipping. Terry Jones, a janitor, remembered the roof that constantly leaked rain. James Griffin, a cook at the plant, recounted this simple rule: "I never ate the peanut butter, and I wouldn't allow my kids to eat it."

Inspectors found several violations of good manufacturing practices in the Georgia peanut butter factory at the center of an investigation into a nationwide salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds of people, federal officials said Tuesday. The Food and Drug Administration said it completed its investigation into the outbreak it linked to the Peanut Corp. of America plant in Blakely, Ga. The agency is to make a report public today.

In one of the largest food recalls in history, the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday asked retailers, manufacturers and consumers to discard every product made in the last two years from peanuts processed by a Georgia plant at the heart of a deadly nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness. Federal officials discovered this month that the company, Peanut Corp.

Federal officials acknowledged Friday that there were warnings about problems at the peanut plant linked to a national salmonella outbreak as early as last April when metal fragments were found in a shipment of chopped peanuts sent to Canada. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the shipment, described as "filthy and putrid," was rejected in Canada and returned to a Peanut Corp. of America facility in Blakely, Ga., where federal officials ordered that the entire shipment be destroyed.

A Georgia health inspector who toured the peanut butter plant now at the center of a national salmonella outbreak noted two violations in October, both minor. Less than three months later, federal inspectors found roaches, mold, a leaking roof and other sanitation problems. Food safety experts say the lapse is a major concern and shows that state inspectors are spread thin and might need more training on how to spot unsanitary conditions.

Members of a Senate panel rebuked federal health and food safety regulators Thursday for slow intervention in the nation's peanut-borne salmonella outbreak, demanding that officials find ways to cooperate when responsibility is split among different agencies. "All of this happened because of a failure -- the failure of our government to prevent unsafe food from entering the food chain," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.

Peanut butter potentially contaminated with salmonella bacteria was included in school lunch programs and emergency meal kits sent to Kentucky after last week's ice storm, officials said Thursday. Nearly 168,000 emergency meal kits sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the state had been recalled more than two weeks earlier because some contained peanut butter that could have been contaminated, federal officials told the Associated Press.

More than half a century ago, residents of rural Early County erected a stone monument topped by an oversized peanut on the courthouse square here as a tribute to the region's signature product. In this self-proclaimed Peanut Capital of the World, people credit peanuts with the area's growth and prosperity.

A little over a month ago, Stewart Parnell was telling friends and clients just how good things were in his peanut business. He was spending time with his grandchild, looking forward to some more hunting and getting his boat out on the water. Today, the man associated with the deadly salmonella outbreak in peanuts is more the recluse.