Salmonella Outbreak Linked to Peanut Butter

The CDC issued a health advisory today that an outbreak of salmonella in 39 states (about 300 cases since August) is linked to an unlikely culprit: peanut butter. Con Agra has recalled jars of Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter with product codes that begin with the number sequence “2111″. Other peanut-butter producers are also being investigated.

The big question is how did salmonella, an germ usually linked to eggs and chicken, get into peanut butter, anyway? We blogged back in December (see the Dec 11 entry) about problems with an increasingly centralized food production system, which makes it harder to trace disease-causing foods back to their sources. Other than that, your guess is as good as ours.