Warning!!! There are Eggs in Egg Nog!!!
I would file this under General Silliness except that it is our government who stepped in and caused the 'issue'.
From the
Portland Press Herald:
Egg in nog? No joke, says Smiling Hill
When your family owns and operates a place called Smiling Hill Farm, you tend to go through life with a grin. But last week, the best Warren Knight could manage was a grimace.
It started with a spot inspection from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration -- it happens every year or two at the Westbrook dairy farm and has never been a big deal.
But this time was different. Looking over a fresh batch of the Smiling Hill egg nog, the inspector did a double take: The bottle cap -- the only place on the otherwise all-glass container with any printing -- was out of federal compliance.
How so?
"Eggs were not listed as an ingredient," Knight recalled.
Egg, you see, is an allergen. As such, the inspector told Knight, it must be explicitly listed as an ingredient somewhere on the one-and-three-eighths-inch-wide cap.
"But the cap says 'Egg Nog!' " protested Knight.
Didn't matter.
"But we're limited by cap space," Knight persisted. What's more, they can't start slapping warning labels onto their reusable bottles without gumming up the bottle washer.
Not the feds' problem.
Yet another instance of the willful dumbing-down of this Nation. Expect people to know that there are eggs in Egg-Nog. Yeah, I know...
The solution:
Knight headed for Staples Thursday and bought a bunch of red, one-inch-round labels. Then he fired up his computer and printed "WARNING Contains EGGS" twice on each one.
Then he and the rest of the family spent the day cutting each label in half and affixing the semi-circular warnings to the cap on each bottle -- being careful not to encroach on the bar code.
"Someday we're going to look back at this and laugh," chortled one of the workers.
Replied Knight, "Yeah, but it won't be tomorrow."
It's not that Knight has anything against enforcing food safety regulations.
"The health and safety of our customers is foremost," he said. "Since without them, we cease to exist."
But Knight checked with the National Institutes of Health and found that .05 percent of the U.S. population is allergic to eggs. And he has a strong hunch that every last one of those poor folks already knows that egg nog contains eggs.
So go ahead and chuckle. But if you're within earshot of Smiling Hill Farm, please do it quietly.
"Sometime after applying sticker number 783," said Knight, "this theater of the absurd stopped being funny."
At the store, we sell a lot of
milk produced by a local dairy and sold in glass bottles. Wonderful stuff as it comes from Jersey cows instead of Holstein. More complete proteins, grass fed and not homogenized.
Posted by DaveH at November 18, 2007 8:47 PM