Here’s to the Winners

During WRC-TV's Thursday-evening piece on the first big Salmonella Outbreak of 2007, as Wendy Rieger and Jim Handly read out the serial numbers from the bad batch of peanut butter—"2...1...1...1..."—I reached for the jar of Peter Pan atop my fridge.

Yup: "2111" was printed on the lid of the half-eaten 40 oz. tub of creamy I'd purchased in the Columbia Heights Giant a few months ago.

It was just like hitting Lotto, only instead of millions of dollars, the payout was billions of potentially fatal bacteria. And in this case, feeling like a winner could also mean suffering acute symptoms such as "the sudden onset of nausea, abdominal cramping, and bloody diarrhea with mucous."