Did You See the Quaker Oats Lawsuit?

Granola? Snacks? No proof of purchase required. Say, you’re not using baby powder, right??

This is why I suggest keeping track of what you and your family eat. There are tons of contamination problems in the food pipeline, so you can randomly become messed up, never knowing you’ve been poisoned.

The United States Food and Drug Administration announced on December 15, 2023 that Quaker had initiated a recall of certain granola bars and cereals due to potential salmonella contamination. The recall was expanded on January 11, 2024 to include additional cereals, granola bars and snacks.

The Quaker class action lawsuit contended that the company failed to warn consumers that the products risked containing salmonella, a potentially life-threatening bacterium. As such, shoppers were misled into believing the items were safe to consume and posed no hazards to their health, the suit alleged.

The 21-page complaint, filed December 27, contends that the roughly 140-year-old food company knew or should have known that the recalled granola bars and granola cereals were not sufficiently tested for the presence of salmonella, and emphasizes that the recalled Quaker Oats items are marketed to “vulnerable persons,” including children.

“Defendant knew or should have known that they owed consumers a duty of care to fully prevent, or at the very least, minimize the presence of harmful Bacteria in their Recalled Products,” the complaint states, accusing Quaker Oats of “recklessly and/or knowingly” selling the recalled granola products without disclosing the possible contamination.

The Food and Drug Administration announced on December 15 of last year that Quaker Oats had initiated a recall of specific granola products. As of December 15, Quaker Oats had received no confirmed reports of illness related to the recalled products, the FDA said.

Here’s the link to the article and information for filing a claim at ClassAction.org.

I remember one father and son at our school who were poisoned by both spinach and peanut butter in the same month. Sauté your spinach, grind sesame seeds for paste. US peanut products are pretty awful, btw — lots of contamination due to cotton rotation, high levels of mold, etc.

Baking simple savory snack foods is a great Practical Life exercise!

Anyhow, these class action sites are always interesting. For example, when I was searching for the lawsuit on acid blockers — Prilosec, I think it was — I randomly saw a lawsuit about defective water pipes. Now here I’d been wondering why the old basement water pipe seems to cleave in half along the top. Sure enough, it was the same stuff of the lawsuit. You know you’re not supposed to use acid blockers? Even if they didn’t cause cancer.

The media is fond of saying Americans sue too much, but we actually have a good habit of resolving disputes in the courtroom, not in the streets. And there are some vile products out there that take decades of damage before recalls are forced. Do you remember the much maligned elderly woman who sued McDonald’s over hot coffee? The media made her sound ridiculous, but the actual case was about McDonald’s refusing to pay for her emergency surgery and skin grafts so she could live without pain and urinate properly after the burns. Their coffee machines had been tweaked to roaring hot, deliberately, despite the fact that other customers had also been burned.

You’re not using baby powder, right? I dropped the whole Johnson & Johnson product line when the baby powder cancer lawsuits started because I realized that asbestos and talc deposits are frequently found in the same mines. Once you know that, you don’t need a lawsuit to realize that you cannot use talc. It’s a super cheap product, so even if the tech to sift out the asbestos exists, no one will use it. They swapped out the talc/asbestos in the US with GMO cornstarch, after some decades of lawsuits. The rest of the world still gets the asbestos.