Confessions Of The Mystery Mama

My friend grabbed my attention recently when she told me about the time she had to destroy all the peanut butter.  That was just the beginning.  She’s had to go after liquor and noodles too and has probably bought more cigarettes than the Rat Pack even though she doesn’t smoke. 

Call her The Mystery Mama.  We can avoid any potential lawsuits that way.  She’s worked some interesting jobs including one as a quality control coordinator responsible for physically acquiring and destroying recalled goods of all types.

Quality Control: Old School Mompreneurs

As Toyota and Fisher Price have reminded us recently, companies occasionally have to get defective products off the market.  The same thing happens for manufacturers of food products and more.  Until recently, I never gave much thought to how those things were rounded up.  That’s where The Mystery Mama comes in. 

You would probably be surprised to know just how much peanut butter could be eliminated in one day by an enterprising mom.  “Peanut butter was a headache,” she says matter-of-factly.  Kids in tow, she drove from store to store snagging up all the recalled peanut butter in town.  Each jar had to be opened, foil seal removed, and squished out into dumpsters.  I’m sure that process smelled wonderful.

She had my attention and began rattling off some of the wildest minivan tales I’ve ever heard, like the time some lunchy meats were contaminated by listeria, a nasty bacteria more deadly than salmonella.  An outbreak a couple years back was especially bad.  Some of the listeria meat made its way into Lunchable type packs.

Mystery Mama raced all over town scooping up boxes of these things until her minivan was packed.  At the distribution center, they packed brown boxes of the stuff in her vehicle until losing visual on a kid or two.  The final boxes were thrown up on the luggage rack!  She was told to open each unit and dump the contents into dumpsters.  Yeah right.

Apparently the thinking is that if left packaged, some unsuspecting dumpster diver might come along and figure they just found lunch but would really end up with listeria.  Dispersing the contents would discourage people like the Freegans I wrote about recently.  We kind of agreed that if you’re gonna eat out of a dumpster you kind of deserve to get listeria.