Check your cartons. Midwest Poultry Services is pulling nearly 1.6 million dozen eggs off the shelves. The culprit? Salmonella Enteritidis. The FDA sounded the alarm on Wednesday, targeting both white and brown cage-free shell eggs stamped out of the company’s Texas facilities. That is a lot of bad omelets.
If you shop at Kroger in Texas or Louisiana, pay attention. The same goes for Brookshire Grocery customers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Mississippi. These contaminated batches flooded those aisles.
Silence from the top. Neither Midwest Poultry nor Kroger scrambled to answer late-night press inquiries. Brookshire, however, jumped on the defensive. They claim they are already purging their shelves, assuring everyone that whatever eggs they have left for sale came from a completely different, hopefully cleaner, facility.
So far, no one is sick. Or at least, no official reports have landed on the FDA’s desk yet. Midwest Poultry has paused all shipments from its Texas farms while they figure out how things went sideways.
Salmonella is a nasty beast. It hides inside or outside the shell, waiting to wreck your week. Eat it, and you get a miserable cocktail of cramps, diarrhea, fever, and vomiting within 12 to 72 hours. Keep an eye on your breakfast.
