By Michael Moss
BLAKELY, Ga. – Raw peanuts were stored next to the finished peanut butter. The roaster was not calibrated to kill deadly germs. Dispirited workers on minimum wage, supplied by temp agencies, donned their uniforms at home, potentially dragging contaminants into the plant, which also had rodents.
Even the roof of the Peanut Corporation of America plant here in rural southwest Georgia was an obvious risk, given that salmonella thrives in water and the facility should have been kept bone dry.
“It leaked when it rained,” said Frank Hardrick, 40, an assistant manager who, along with four other workers, described life inside the plant. “Different crews would come in to work on it, but it would still leak.”
The conditions at the plant, more circa 1955 than 2009, would have been enough to cause alarm in an industry where sanitation can be a matter of life and death, food experts said.
But they were only one element in the salmonella outbreak and subsequent food safety train wreck that started here and swept through the country – claiming eight lives, sickening an estimated 19,000 people in 43 states and spurring an array of recalls, including TV dinners, snack bars labeled organic and ready-made meals for disaster relief.
An examination of the Blakely case reveals a badly frayed food safety net. Interviews and government records show that state and federal inspectors do not require the peanut industry to inform the public – or even the government – of salmonella contamination in its plants. And industry giants like Kellogg used processed peanuts in a variety of products but relied on the factory to perform safety testing and divulge any problems.
At the same time, processed peanuts have been finding their way into more and more foods as a low-cost yet tasty additive, making tainted products harder to track.
Problems emerged in southwest Georgia’s peanut country in 2004, when a whistleblower reported that the food-product giant ConAgra Foods had found salmonella in peanut butter at its plant in Sylvester, Ga., 75 miles from Blakely. But when plant officials declined to release their laboratory tests, the Food and Drug Administration did not pursue the records and was unable to confirm the report of salmonella.
The government finally demanded the records three years later, and verified the whistleblower’s claims, after hundreds of people were sickened by salmonella-tainted peanut butter produced at the plant in 2007. Even then, ConAgra insisted that the government not make those records public, according to documents obtained last week by The New York Times. Calling its testing proprietary, ConAgra told the food agency in a Feb. 27, 2007, letter: “Once F.D.A. has completed its review of the documents, please return them to ConAgra Foods or shred.”
ConAgra, which makes Peter Pan, ultimately improved conditions at its plant and increased testing. But neither federal regulators nor state regulators imposed those same standards on other peanut facilities like the one in Blakely, records and interviews show. To the contrary, inspection reports on the Peanut Corporation of America plant over the last three years show that state inspectors – Georgia has only 60 agents to monitor 16,000 food-handling businesses – missed major problems that workers say were chronic.
Georgia officials said budget constraints and other outbreaks of food-borne illnesses diminished their abilities to inspect the peanut plants.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration accused the Peanut Corporation of America of repeatedly shipping peanut butter and other products right after discovering salmonella, which is commonly found in the feces of humans and animals. The agency had previously said the company held up the shipments until a second test came back negative for the bacteria.
“Our whole family was angry,” said Jeff Almer of Savage, Minn., whose 72-year-old mother, Shirley Mae, died in December after eating tainted peanut butter from the plant. “This could have been avoided.”
The Peanut Corporation of America, a family-run business based in Lynchburg, Va., now under criminal investigation, declined to discuss events leading to the outbreak, saying in a statement: “We are sorry our process fell short of not only our goals, but more importantly, your expectations.”
Kellogg said it was looking for ways to improve its procedures for buying ingredients.
With children accounting for half of the salmonella illnesses traced to the Blakely plant – and a worldwide recall that now includes pails of peanut butter shipped to schools, military bases and nursing homes – the safety issues raised by the outbreak are drawing comparisons to those in China’s tainted milk scandal.
“It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing our food safety problems as coming from other countries,” said Robert Tauxe, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who helped trace the outbreak to the Blakely plant. “This outbreak is telling us we haven’t been paying enough attention.”
The Peanut Corporation of America began making peanut butter at the plant on Magnolia Street about three years ago, said Blakely’s mayor, Ric Hall. Peanut paste, a purer mash without added sugar, followed.
“They had a little niche market, importing some peanuts from Mexico and South America, and buying a lower grade,” said Mr. Hall, who visited the plant when it clogged city sewers with oil overflows. “To the uninitiated, it looked like they were doing everything right.”
But its yellow-brick walls hid the array of poor work conditions and safety flaws, said employees, who lost their jobs when the plant closed on Jan. 16.
Many of the hourly workers earned only minimum wage and had gone years without a raise. Frederic McClendon, 31, a shift supervisor, reached $12 an hour last year but still could not afford health insurance for his two boys, who live in a weather-beaten trailer. “If you pay your workers, you get the best out of them,” Mr. McClendon said. “If you don’t, you don’t.”
Using temporary workers also saved money, said Mr. Hardrick, the assistant manager, “but there was a lot of retraining going on.”
After Canadian officials in April found metal shavings in peanuts produced by the plant, a new manager handed out raises, stepped up cleaning and imposed tighter safety controls.
But the effort, employees said, was too little, too late for the salmonella problems, given that the plant had been shipping tainted products since 2007.
Mr. Hardrick said he had known about the salmonella at the time, but had been told the positive test results were only “presumptive” for the bacteria, not definitive. He regularly took peanut butter home to his family.
Inspecting the plant was the responsibility of Georgia, which like 42 other states is under contract with the Food and Drug Administration to monitor food plants. The agency’s Science Board concluded in 2007 that the agency did not have the capacity to ensure a safe food supply, with domestic businesses under its purview having risen to 65,500 from 51,000 in 2001.
In Georgia, state agriculture inspectors said they were hampered by rising needs and falling budgets. The state asked inspectors to conduct more tests for contamination, but slashed the number of miles they could drive, said Leta Emily Bird, who had 310 businesses to monitor in Georgia before she retired last fall. “You might do the inspection, but it takes a lot more driving to get a test done and delivered,” she said.
Reports show that the state ran tests for salmonella on three samples from the Blakely plant in 2007, and none in 2006 or 2008.
The last state inspection, on Oct. 23, 2008, found just two problems: mildew and dust in a storage room, and the reuse of shipping bags.
Plant employees said they typically had advance knowledge of state inspections and that last month, when they were tipped off that federal investigators were coming, the employees were told not to answer questions. Where the state had found no major problems, the federal team found many, like the leaky roof, and swab tests showed salmonella living on the plant floors. Plant managers had not decontaminated the peanut butter processing line after detecting salmonella, the federal report shows.
In examining Peanut Corporation of America’s records, federal investigators discovered that company tests had found salmonella 12 times since 2007. The inspectors said they got the records by invoking a bioterrorism law.
Dr. Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, said he got an inside look into the nation’s food safety problem when ConAgra hired him two years ago to help address its salmonella crisis.
ConAgra, which acknowledges its past mistakes, shut its plant down for six months, studied the problem and spent $33 million to eliminate water leaks, air flows that might carry contaminants and numerous other threats. Employees now have 80 rules to follow before beginning work, starting with uniforms that they can’t take home. “I like to say that we built a submarine,” the plant manager, Earl Ehret, said last week.
ConAgra bolstered its salmonella testing process, sampling one jar per production line every 20 minutes. The company said it will also will turn over test results to inspectors upon request.
But even ConAgra may only go so far. Asked if the company would notify the Food and Drug Administration on its own if it finds salmonella, the company’s spokeswoman, Stephanie K. Childs, said: “Your question is new for us. It’s one the company is considering.”
Georgia regulators said they plan to try to change state law to require greater disclosure of food safety tests. But Dr. Steven M. Solomon, an official in the federal agency’s Office of Regulatory Affairs, said the agency has viewed such disclosures as a “double-edged sword” that might inhibit some companies from testing in the first place.
The ConAgra and Peanut Corporation of America outbreaks have left victims and their families embittered about the government’s role in protecting consumers.
David Marshall’s wife testified before Congress in 2007 after his mother, Mora Lou Marshall, of Shreveport, La., fell ill after eating Peter Pan peanut butter, which her dentist had recommended for her health.
Now the family is troubled to see the episode repeating itself, along with new vows to set things right. Another Congressional hearing on tainted peanut butter is scheduled for this week.
“The other day, there was some congresswoman saying we need to enact laws now to not let this happen again,” Mr. Marshall said. “And I was like, ‘You idiot. What have you all been doing?’ The law should have been enacted years ago, and this made us wonder, what does the F.D.A. even do?”
In Blakely, trouble at the plant has hit the black community especially hard, said Benjamin Cawthon, a former city councilman and community organizer. Most of the workers outside of management were black, and they worry they will not be able to find new jobs.
Mr. McClendon, the shift supervisor, said he was equally angered by the company’s response to finding salmonella, which he had not known about until now.
“What’s boiling inside my head is, if you find salmonella once, do something to change things,” he said. “But three times, you need to take drastic action, and 12 times?”
Mr. McClendon paused, and then said, “I can go find another job, but you can’t bring people back alive.”
Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, and Andrew Martin and Margot Williams from New York.
