Eating peanut butter with no fear of PCA

As I’m writing this, I’m eating a peanut butter sandwich. With jelly, without fear.

For unlike many Americans, I’m one of those people who reads past headlines like: “Rogue peanuts on the loose: We’re all going to die!” and actually finishes the whole story.

OK, I haven’t really seen a headline like that. It’s just the subtext.

And, hey, weren’t we feeling a little ignored by the national media since Jerry Falwell’s passing? Now, we’re all over the Internet, identified with a company that supposedly kills people. It’s a test of that old adage: Any publicity is good publicity.

I did a feature story on the Peanut Corporation of America back in the ’80s, interviewing then-chairman Hugh Parnell. His company was interesting, he was cordial, and it was nothing more than a nice little business page story. I never thought much about PCA thereafter.

Nor, based on Bryan Gentry’s story in The News & Advance last Friday, has the rest of Lynchburg. Indeed, PCA could hardly have kept a lower profile if it were manufacturing moonshine. Stewart Parnell, of the next family generation of owners and operators, runs PCA out of his home and never felt the need to join the larger social circle of local business people. The company’s factories are in Sussex, Plainview, Texas and Blakely, Ga.

The thing is, PCA sells primarily to institutional customers such as nursing homes and schools. Some of its peanuts are also used in candy and peanut butter crackers. But it has nothing to do with Jif and Peter Pan and the other name-brand peanut purveyors, a fact apparently lost of folks who have contributed to a 25 percent drop in peanut butter sales by not buying it.

So far, a salmonella outbreak traced back to PCA’s Blakely plant has affected several hundred people and caused eight fatalities. Another fatality, in the long run, might be the Parnells’ business.

Still, I can’t help but wonder about stories that imply that people at Blakely knowingly shipped out peanut paste they knew was affected with salmonella bacteria. If true, not only would that make them bad human beings, but also bad businessmen. The possible gains of saving a little time and selling a few more crates of product would obviously be dwarfed by the looming possible negatives. Wouldn’t they?

In this litigious society, no one in his right mind would place his company in the path of a firestorm of negative reaction such as has already happened. Would he?

The way Stewart Parnell has handled this is, I think, telling. When the story first broke, PCA actually ran news items about the salmonella outbreak on its Web site, and Parnell issued several statements. No real problem here, folks — we’ll get to the bottom of it. When the salmonella really hit the fan, he went into Howard Hughes mode and hired “media relations specialists” who don’t return our phone calls.

If this turns out to be a case of some of the workers on the Blakely warehouse floor taking it upon themselves to let these “bad” batches go, or letting them escape accidentally, it’s still a lesson on how what we do can affect so many other people. It’s amazing how many different products used PCA peanuts.

And if Parnell was undercut and undone by some of his underlings, I feel for him. Me, I’ll keep eating peanut butter.

Of course, I have been sick all weekend ...