Talk:Peanut Corporation of America

Deaths from outbreak

Can anyone find a list of people killed in this outbreak? FMAFan1990 (talk) 00:15, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

"8 people died in 43 states" : they were spread pretty thin! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.178.179.172 (talk) 17:11, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Good catch. Newest reword is better. Tripodian (talk) 19:51, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

PCA website contains a typographical error

The website for Peanut Corporation of America contains the following notice:

"As you may know, certain recent events have made it necessary for Peanut Corporation of America to seek protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Effective immediately, all corporate operations will cease. Any questions regarding the company or the operations of its affiliates, Plainview Peanut Co, LLC and Tidewater Blanching, LLC, should be forwarded to Mr. Andy Goldstein, the company's bankruptcy council at 540-343-9800"

Apparently, the company not only has problems with peanut processing, but it has trouble with spelling. It is not the "bankruptcy council" but rather the "bankruptcy counsel."

If they cannot proofread a simple notice, why would anyone trust them to manufacture food products???

John Paul Parks (talk) 00:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I changed the title of this section because it was pejorative.

In any event, according to the "Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines" page, "The purpose of a Wikipedia talk page is to provide space for editors to discuss changes to its associated article or project page. Article talk pages should not be used by editors as platforms for their personal views." It is not clear to me that anything in this section is apt to result in a change in the article's content, so it may not be appropriate.

Fun with aluminum (talk) 16:23, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

A thought

Should this article be renamed "2009 peanut recall" or something of the sort? It's not really about PCA. SDY (talk) 01:54, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

I read the whole article and everything was about one company PCA (and its terrible conduct). There is a lot of history and background, corporate and owner information. I was redirected to the article via other pages in Wikipedia. Maybe someone could create an automatic redirect to it when people type in "2009 peanut recall"? Zincio (talk) 15:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

The lead is great, but the rest of the article is about the recall. It's not a big problem, I'm just thinking that when we have biographies of people notable for only one event there's a gentle suggestion to cover the event and not the person. I'm pretty darn sure they didn't mean the legal definition of "person" which includes corporations, but there's some sense to the guidance and there are some living people involved. It's not a big deal, but just a thought. SDY (talk) 17:58, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

I put a recentism problem template. Either the beginning should have mention the history of the company before the outbreak and then link to the Peanut Recall article, or dramatically shorten the slant towards recent events. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Schnarr (talk • contribs) 06:29, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

This needs updating

Not only are the recalls still tricking in; but also comes word that Nestle USA conducted its own inspections in 2002 and 2006 and ultimately rejected the services of PCA based on its findings, rather than relying on audits conducted by the American Institute of Baking... Ranma9617 (talk) 01:49, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Removing citation when it does not support text to which it was affixed, etc.

Came here to acquaint myself with the S.t. contamination case, and then to perform some minor copyediting of references, called out by red warning text.

In doing so found a February 2009 Washington Post article citation affixed to several sentences where it was clearly either added after the fact, or without care. The citation is given here.

In some cases the problem could be fixed by minor editing (taking greater care that the Wikipedia text accurately reflect the information in the source).

In other cases, no simple work could be done to make the citation support the text, to WP:VERIFY and scholarly policies/standards. Those cases are listed here. At each bullet, an explanation is given why it was removed. Most reasons are not subtle, but the last one is; but all are based on long academic experience. At each point where this citation was removed, a tag was placed as a marker that the sentence needs to be checked and sourced, at points where no other citation appeared.

• "Brooks said the Parnells ran PCA on a very tight budget, buying the cheapest shoes they could find." There is no mention whatsoever of shoes in the Wash Post article, though there is loose/general support for the first part of the statement. Either there is another citation, not supplied, quoting the businessman Brooks about shoes, or this citation was sloppily placed.
• "The company operated a bare-bones front office from a converted garage behind Parnell's home outside Lynchburg, and relied almost exclusively on minimum-wage labor." There is no "exclusively" in this source, and this is likely inaccurate, as S. Parnell employed family. Moreover, this sentence convolutes two stages of the business reported in the article, the pre-1995 business run by Hugh Parnell, and the post re-buy business run by Stewart Parnell. This description has been corrected, attributing observations to each period, as appropriate.
• "One employee remembered seeing a family of baby mice in a tote of peanuts, and others recalled having to step over standing water inside the building after heavy rain." Neither part of this statement is supported by this citation—the word mice or mouse does not appear in the Wash Post article, and while there is some content regarding leaking in the Post citation, the article makes no mention of "standing water" or of an employee stepping over such. (You can't place a citation in general support of specific content.) If the other source appearing supports the text, fine. This citation does not.
• "There had been concerns about sanitation at the company since at least the mid-1980s." This sentence may be true, but it is not supported by this citation. The connotation of this text is there were concerns that were in some sense public, and so actionable. In the same way that a concern that exists only in ones thoughts is not actionable, and so is immaterial to a general encyclopedic statement, so too is any privately held concern that was not communicated publicly (e.g., to a regulatory agency). Since Mr Brooks' observations were never expressed broadly and publicly, and so were not actionable, this private individual's opinion is unsuited to be a sentence in an encyclopedia article's lead. As the article only quotes a Mr Brooks, a buyer for a snack company, about the 1980s, it is only reporting on a private transaction between businesses, and a private and personal opinion, an opinion that never was elevated to be a publicly stated concern. So, in fairness, another source has to be found to support the existence of general concern from the 1980s; Mr Brooks personal opinion is insufficient for a lead statement in an encyclopedic article.

Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 19:55, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Further edits of this day

The last major edit, though appearing minor in the edit history, removed all mis-representations of the Wash Post article discussed above, and added sections so that material appearing only in the lead, now also appears in the main body of text (as much as possible, with sources). At the same time, I performed an further broad edit of the article and main body, to accomplish two things:

• First, to de-convolute the company's timeline, which had gone through three separate owners over the history of its existence, a ownership periods that had earlier been smudged/blended together. While the current presentation is not yet good, it is much closer to historically accurate than it was prior.
• Second, to address what had become a hodge-podge placement of material that defied any clear article structure. Such edits here were primarily the moving of blocks of text to make them consistent, and creating new section and subsection headings. The issues addressed included (i) removing the admixture of geography-specific content, so each plant's information now appears only under its proper section; (ii) removing the admixture of investigative information that regarded the plants when owned by Hugh Parnell (historic, pre-1995) and by outside parties (1995-2000) from the 2009 investigative results, when only Stewart Parnell was responsible; and (iii) generally ordering content consistently, chronologically, as this was the plan before I arrived.

The simple fact was that news article appearing in 2009 presented results of interviews and other investigations that reflected insights across the whole of the company's history, and these were extracted by WP editors in such a way that investigative results specific to each of the three ownership periods were all mixed together. While it makes for interesting background for a news story that unsanitary conditions were suggested in a private inspection by a potential client performed in the 1980s (when Hugh Parnell was the owner, and Stewart Parnell and employee), this is simply not germane in sections that regard Stewart Parnell's decision-making from 2000-2009 after he re-purchased the company from the outside owners, and took control of its operation.

Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 19:55, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Deep reservations about the quality of sourcing at this article

Given the way in which the Layton-Miroff Washington Post article citation was used by editors at this article, as reflected in the foregoing Talk section, I have to communicate deep reservations about the overall trustworthiness/veracity of the content of this article, and will place a tag accordingly, until every citation is checked as thoroughly as that one. Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 19:55, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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