After reading today’s BBC News article about convicted Gloucester, England chemist, Sahnoun Daifallah, who was sentenced to nine years in prison for spraying a disgusting and dangerous concoction of urine and feces on various food items in Gloucestershire supermarkets, I began to wonder…what if that happened here in the US? As it turns out, it already has.
In 1996, a disgruntled ex-Pizza Hut employee was charged with filling a container with feces and delivering it to a school along with Pizza Hut spaghetti lunches intended for the school’s children. Before the container was found, ten children had already consumed the spaghetti lunch. Thankfully nobody was made ill.
And back in 2001, Marco Arellano was arrested in NYC for a dozen incidents of intentionally contaminating food at various public food buffets over several months. He was finally caught in the act of using two bottles to spray what the police believed to be a mixture of his own urine and feces on a salad bar at the Alpine Gourmet Farm restaurant.
Is it too much to ask for feces and urine-free food, human or otherwise? Based on the recent spate of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli outbreaks, that answer appears to be YES.