Taylor Farms pulled prepared foods with jalapenos from Walmart, Kroger, and Whole Foods after a salmonella outbreak. The company acted Sunday. Retail traders immediately checked their portfolios to see if they owned Taylor Farms stock. They do not. Taylor Farms is private. This did not stop three of them from panic-selling Sysco.
The recall covers salsa and guacamole. Products that sit in refrigerated cases under fluorescent lights while shoppers walk past them to buy tortilla chips they'll eat alone. The jalapenos came from a supplier. Taylor Farms won't say which one. Probably because naming the supplier would require Taylor Farms to admit they don't actually farm anything, they just assemble other people's vegetables into plastic containers and slap a pastoral name on top.
Salmonella traces back to jalapenos. Not tomatoes. Not onions. Not the avocados that cost more than crude oil. Jalapenos. The one ingredient people specifically request less of. Someone got food poisoning from the thing they asked to go easy on. Couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
Food-safety fears are intensifying, according to the headline. They are not. Nobody woke up Monday morning afraid of prepackaged guacamole. They woke up afraid of their credit card bill and their performance review and the fact that their Robinhood account is down 43% since they discovered options trading. Guacamole ranks somewhere below getting hit by a meteor.
Whole Foods carried the recalled products. Whole Foods customers are now Googling whether salmonella is gluten-free. Kroger customers are wondering if this means the salsa will go on clearance. Walmart customers already ate it last week and feel fine, which tells you everything about immune systems built on a lifetime of Great Value brand decisions.
Taylor Farms stock is not tradable, the salsa was already borderline inedible, and the only thing getting liquidated here is someone's intestinal tract.
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