Brushing your teeth with peanut butter might be worse

As Bruce Schneier and others frequently point out, humans are really not so very good at assessing security risks. A case in point: the Chinese toothpaste flap.

Is this insanity merely proof once again of what happens under “free market” conditions (both here and in China), or is this really a case study in why the Soviet Union never won the Cold War, just because the Russians thought nukes were the battelfield weapon of choice and never even thought of killing all of us (and our cats) with poisoned food and oral hygiene products? Whichever it is, I am NOT brushing my teeth with any more toothpaste from Aldi's, that's for DAMN sure....

...writes Dark Wraith at Pam's House Blend. And yeah, it's true, ethylene glycol in the toothpaste is not a good thing, nor is the melamine recently contaminated pet food in the US and worked its way into the human food chain as well, or other contaminants in food imported from elsewhere, of which there has been much in the news in recent weeks (and much for the FDA to answer for).

But. For all the scariness of food from foreign lands, the most dangerous foodstuff so far this year has apparently been peanut butter manufactured in the US by the US food-manufacturing company, ConAgra.

MINNEAPOLIS (Bloomberg News) — ConAgra Foods’ peanut butter, recalled in February after it was linked to a salmonella outbreak, sickened 628 people in 47 states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I'm just pointing out here, for the record. So it's really not necessary here to get too concerned about “free markets” (not something I'm unreservedly in favor of, myself) or “asymmetric warfare” until we deal with quantifiably bigger dangers here at home.


Link: Schneier on Security
Link: Pam's House Blend:: A Short Rant on Free Markets and Asymmetric Warfare
Link: The Buffalo News: World & Nation