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Looking over the current list of product recall notices on the Trading Standards Institute website is something I often do as part of my work within a personal injury solicitor's office, and it's always a little unnerving to find a product on their list that you know you have bought.
This time it's scampi.
The notice gives a batch code and a best-before-end date and then goes on to inform me, and the rest of the general public who might happen upon the trading standards site (as you do), that the manufacturer "is taking the precautionary measure of recalling [the product], 235g following the discovery of some pieces of glass in a small number of packets."
I have had several reactions to this little nugget of info:
Firstly, unless I write down the specific details right now, go straight home after work and scrabble around in my freezer to dig out the scampi to compare the codes, etc, I am likely to forget all about the product recall and inadvertently feed small pieces of glass to my family in the coming weeks. Now that wouldn't be good, but there is a distinct possibility that I won't write the details down and by the time I get home this Friday evening, I will have absolutely no intention of heading in the direction of the freezer and the only food preparation I will be doing is reaching for the takeaway menus and the phone.
Secondly, how does a food manufacturer, who undoubtedly follows every stringent health and safety regulation that there is, manage to get small pieces of glass in their product? My mind hypothesises about a hair-netted worker in white coat and white welly boots sneaking a refreshing slug from a retro cola bottle, but just as they are lip-smacked and thirst-quenched their scampi tainted fingers lose grasp on the vessel and it drops into a vat of tumbling Norway lobsters, instantaneously shattering into a thousand pieces. In fear of his job, the hair-netted worker looks round surreptitiously and then lets the process continue as he knows the scampi are likely to go through several more production steps before they end up in my freezer and he wholeheartedly believes that all the glass will dissipate. Shame on him!
Lastly, and the most disturbing thought that always occurs to me as I read the recall notices, how was the glass discovered? This is always the rub with product liability cases that turn up in the personal injury solicitor's office; someone somewhere has got an electric shock from the faulty toaster, or their hair has turned green instead of "rich red auburn", or when they pulled the cord on their lifejacket as they landed overboard in a freezing ocean, nothing happened! These things worry me.
Somewhere in the UK a family sat down to scampi and chips one evening; maybe with a salad on the side, a blob of tartare sauce and a nice glass of wine, and suddenly found their mouth lacerated and bleeding as they chewed on the coke bottle. It's not a nice thought, but this is how a faulty product is discovered. And, after the dash to A&E, X-rays, a nurse pulling glass from the depths of their mouth, and perhaps a stitch or three, they probably thought, "this should not have happened, someone is to blame."
So, the bags of scampi end up on a product recall list and a hastily typed notice on A4 paper is taped up in the shop doorway of, hopefully, every retailer who sold the bags of seafood. We've all seen the notices, but how often do we read them? We're busy doing the weekly shop, buying Friday night's tea, ooh what about scampi and chips?
Product liability; it's a minefield and somewhere in the country a personal injury solicitor is probably preparing the compensation claim case right now for the scampi customer. I hope he does his job well.
