Just When We Thought Easter Candy Couldn't Get Worse: Salmonella
There are two holidays in particular each year that bring a vast tsunami of candy along with them to fill the shelves of every local convenience store and mini-mart. The first, of course, is Halloween, all the better to supply trick or treaters with. The second is Easter. The quantity of candy for each might be similar, but the quality, well, there’s where we find the starkest difference. See, Halloween is happy to let candy be itself. It doesn’t try to mess with the success of things like Twix bars. Easter, though, perhaps owing to its religious background, demands only the worst possible version of each type of candy, customized for the resurrection of the lord Jesus Christ via pastel shades and bunny shapes.
So it’s even more unfortunate to hear that suddenly, a bunch of children that were already forced to make do with waxy, crumbly, bunny shaped chocolates and chalky pastel bites of all sorts now may be at risk for salmonella. The chocolate maker Ferrero apparently pumped out a series of rotten chocolate eggs due to what officials speculate is bad buttermilk, and as a result, they’re attempting to recall all the bad eggs.
Getting sick off of nasty easter cream eggs is just patently unfair. It’s like contracting E. Coli from unwashed lettuce. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime, so to speak. Things like food poisoning, salmonella, et al should be contracted from a deep guilty pleasure or a meal you already know you likely shouldn’t trust. If you have to be hunched on the toilet blowing out an o-ring, you should be able to fondly remember a deeply satisfying 3 AM halal cart visit.
Instead, any of these poor kids who were struck by sickness as part of this outbreak did so following a deeply pedestrian snack. They probably unwrapped this weird little egg, stared at it, rotating it in their little hand, wondering why Jesus wouldn’t allow them to just have a regular Reese’s Cup. They then popped the egg into their mouth, chewing it with the grim resolve of a noir detective throwing back a shot of desk whiskey. It simply adds insult to injury.
