Did you know there was Eggs in EggNog?

andtckrtoo

Cathlete
Are we not expected to have ANY common sense any more?


http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story_pf.php?id=148740&ac=PHnws

Egg in nog? No joke, says Smiling Hill


BILL NEMITZ

November 18, 2007




When your family owns and operates a place called Smiling Hill
Farm, you tend to go through life with a grin. But last week, the
best Warren Knight could manage was a grimace.

It started with a spot inspection from the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration -- it happens every year or two at the Westbrook
dairy farm and has never been a big deal.

But this time was different. Looking over a fresh batch of the
Smiling Hill egg nog, the inspector did a double take: The bottle
cap -- the only place on the otherwise all-glass container with
any printing -- was out of federal compliance.

How so?

"Eggs were not listed as an ingredient," Knight recalled.

Egg, you see, is an allergen. As such, the inspector told Knight,
it must be explicitly listed as an ingredient somewhere on the
one-and-three-eighths-inch-wide cap.

"But the cap says 'Egg Nog!' " protested Knight.

Didn't matter.

"But we're limited by cap space," Knight persisted. What's more,
they can't start slapping warning labels onto their reusable
bottles without gumming up the bottle washer.

Not the feds' problem.

Then things turned really sour. The FDA notified the Maine
Department of Agriculture that all Smiling Hill egg nog on store
shelves -- about 400 gallons at that point -- had to be recalled
to protect people with egg allergies who don't know there's egg
in egg nog.

Enter, not a moment too soon, Ashley Slattery, Maine's dairy
inspector.

"We really didn't want to do a recall," Slattery said Friday. Still,
she added, the FDA wanted something on that cap "so the
people would know egg nog contains eggs."

Umm ... wouldn't people already know
that by the name of the product?

"You'd think so," Slattery said.

So here's the deal. No recall, but Knight agreed to have his label
redesigned to include the ingredients and, in the meantime, affix
a warning label to every bottle of egg nog that leaves his farm.

Knight headed for Staples Thursday and bought a bunch of red,
one-inch-round labels. Then he fired up his computer and
printed "WARNING Contains EGGS" twice on each one.

Then he and the rest of the family spent the day cutting each
label in half and affixing the semi-circular warnings to the cap
on each bottle -- being careful not to encroach on the bar code.

"Someday we're going to look back at this and laugh," chortled
one of the workers.

Replied Knight, "Yeah, but it won't be tomorrow."

It's not that Knight has anything against enforcing food safety
regulations.

"The health and safety of our customers is foremost," he said.
"Since without them, we cease to exist."

But Knight checked with the National Institutes of Health and
found that .05 percent of the U.S. population is allergic to eggs.
And he has a strong hunch that every last one of those poor
folks already knows that egg nog contains eggs.

So go ahead and chuckle. But if you're within earshot of Smiling
Hill Farm, please do it quietly.

"Sometime after applying sticker number 783," said Knight, "this
theater of the absurd stopped being funny."



Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at:

[email protected]


Copyright © 2007 Blethen Maine Newspapers
 
From someone who is allergic to eggs ... THAT explains the severe stomach pains I've been having this holiday season! :p
 
Wow. That just verified that the world is as dumb as I thought....

Allison
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http://www.picturetrail.com/allisonj90
 
*lol* This is as bad as banning Santa from saying, "ho ho ho."

[font face="heather" font color=black size=+2]~Cathy[/font]
[font face="comic sans ms"]http://s228.photobucket.com/albums/ee296/runninteach/th_sunshine.gif
 
Gee, now I'm curious where olive oil comes from.....

The government can be awful helpful though...I sure am glad they told me to stop using my hair dryer in the bath tub!
 
>OMG where does baby oil come from!!!!!!!
>Wait a minute..... does that mean that there are peanuts in peanut butter?



LOL:7,mmmmm girl scout cookies:9
 
This is all a carefully contrived, evil-corporation conspiracy to divert people's attention from the real, truly frightening fact that eggnog actually contains NOG.

That's N-O-G, people. Derived from the pit of the berry of the nog-nog tree, and proven to cause addiction to The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

A-Jock
 
>OMG where does baby oil come from!!!!!!!


In Southern Illinois there are small oil rigs in the corn fields. I had my mom's friend convinced that that's where corn oil comes from!!!!

Nan
 
That almost reminds me about the outcry of seal coats made of course form baby seals. But how many people are complaining about the treatment of Naugas? I mean they're raised just for their skin, we know it as Naugahide.

Not to mention the cruelty of those boneless skinless chicken ranches, what kind of life do those poor chickens have just laying on the farm as the have no skeleton to hold them up? No skin to protect them from the sun?

The cruel mass sterilizations just so we can have seedless oranges and grapes. I could go on.
 
It does sound ridiculous on first reading but not so stupid when I think about it. I suppose, ahem, that in this day and age of ready-to-eat convenience foods and artificial ingredient-filled crap (e.g. "juice" made up of essentially colorized, flavorized sugar water and what is it? 10% fruit juice) there could very well be some commercial egg nog with no egg. If egg wasn't listed in the ingredients list I wouldn't just assume it contained egg, I'd wonder what sort of concoction it actually was. (Same goes for peanut butter with no peanuts listed or lemon juice with no lemon listed-- on every package I've ever checked they were the first thing there.) Someone allergic could conceivably be lulled into a false sense of security. Warning labels are overkill, but if an eggnog product contains eggs, they should be listed in the list of ingredients, otherwise someone might assume quite reasonably that they aren't there!
 

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