Something smells a bit funny, here...

Some school children in Illinois have been served food contaminated with ammonia according to state records, after education officials failed to notify schools that the food had been tainted.

Dozens of children were sickened.

The food was contaminated when a ruptured pipe leaked 90 pounds of ammonia refrigerant at Gateway Cold Storage in St. Louis on Nov. 18, 2001.

How, exactly, something like this happened is a bit unclear. What is known is that a USDA inspector was aware of the leak around the time it occured, and the warehouse was put under quarentine, yet, according to Missouri and St. Louis officials, the USDA ignored the quarentine and allowed Gateway to ship the food to schools. Education officials suspected that 3,800 cases of contaminated food was shipped, according to documents the Chicago Tribune (which initially reported thestory) had access to.

The results were at least somewhat predictable:

Nearly a year after the leak, 42 children at Laraway Elementary School in Joliet were rushed to a hospital after eating chicken tenders from the warehouse that state health officials said contained up to 133 times the accepted level of ammonia.

Now, to me, the obvious question is "Why wasn't the contaminated food destroyed upon discovery of the problem?" Apparently, the food was kept while St. Louis health officials tried to find a way to "treat and "salvage" it. I don't know about anyone else, but if it were my kids, I would not want them eating food that had been contaminated and "salvaged". I realize that destroying and replacing the food would have cost a fair amount, but the inevitable lawsuits that will be resulting from this malfeasance are going to cost a lot more.

One of our national mantras has long been that we must do things "for the good of the children" or "to protect the children". Senator Rick Santorum has tried to justify his belief that there should be no right to privacy and that the government should be able to regulate private, sexual behaviour between consenting adults because some behaviours are detrimental to "healthy, stable families" and happy, stable families are necessary for the good of, you guessed it, the children. Yet the USDA and Illinois Board of Education couldn't be bothered to tell schools that they were receiving food contaminated with ammonia or, better yet, stop the food from being distributed - knowing that children would be eating it? The anecdotal "Adam and Steve" giving each other blow jobs in the privacy of their own bedroom are too dangerous to children for their actions to be legal, but it's ok for them to eat food that's been tainted with ammonia? I'm sorry, but I just can't follow that logic.*

The Illinois Board of Education, the USDA and the FDA are all investigating, and the Will County state's attorney's office is bringing the situation before a grand jury. This is all well and good, but given that the USDA and the Illinois Board of Education both apparently knew about the problem and did nothing, I'm not quite sure what their investigations are likely to show, and the fact that it happened at all is simply inexcusable.

As the mother of one of the girls who was sickened by the food said: "How could they care so little about the kids that they would just look the other way and serve them any old food?"

*For the record, I don't believe that private sexual behaviour, reading material or other entertainment choices and so on, should be regulated "for the good of the children". I think kids can - and should - be protected from inappropriate material by their parents, without having to deny all adults access to it. My point, though, is that it makes no sense to me that, if we're not going to worry enough about the health and well-being of kids to do something as basic as avoiding serving them contaminated food in the schools, then how on earth does anyone get off trying to justify restricting adult behaviour "for the good of the children"?

Posted by thorswitch at April 27, 2003 02:15 AM | TrackBack