CIO, the magazine for corporate Chief Information Officers, has an interesting report on this year’s recall of Peter Pan peanut butter. It’s written from the standpoint of company data managers, the folks responsible for setting up tracking systems for product recalls. Fine, but what about food safety systems?
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times ran stories today about the deepening scandal over graft and corruption in Iraq food service. The Journal article comes with a nifty illustration of the chain of companies involved in supplying peanut butter, calzones, and frozen French fries to the troops, easily explaining where there might be plenty of room for kickbacks. According to the Times, the key company under investigation, Public Warehousing, was paid a billion dollars by the military for its part in the chain. Expensive calories, those.
Peanut butter, it seems, is the basis of a “ready-to-use therapeutic food” (RUTF) for aiding recovery of severely malnourished children in Africa. The announcement of these results doesn’t say what kind. The study itself is published in Maternal and Child Nutrition and the authors make the point that people administering this RUTF do not need to be medically trained so this therapy can be used at home. I’m always amazed when researchers discover that feeding malnourished children helps them to recover. Peanut butter is highly concentrated in calories and the investigators mixed in some vitamins along with it, so I guess it can be considered a superfood.
