Americans just love to close the barn door after the horse is out. And even though we swear that lightning never strikes twice we go around as if we are lightning rods just waiting for some kind of divine retribution delivered through the food we eat.
How else can we describe the fact that sales of spinach have not bounced back after more than a year? Consumers are probably just as wary of peanut butter or hamburgers (but blithely go on stuffing sushi and other raw-raw hip foods into their gullible gullets).
So, when news gets out about a third person killed by listeria-tainted milk, how many people will go screaming into the bathroom to make sure their upper lip hasn’t been eaten through by their milk moustache? Certainly, people in Massachusetts, where the deaths have been traced to a Shrewsbury dairy, are going to think twice before they reach for their next carton. Of course, in Massachusetts, the odds of dying in traffic on the way to get milk are thousands of times greater than any chance any bacteria has of getting you.