PB blues

George Washington Carver has always been one of my heroes and only partly because he invented peanut butter.

Peanut butter is a wonderful food. You can eat it straight out of the jar or slathered onto a variety of surfaces. You can mix it with any number of things. It makes great cookies and contributes to wonderful candies.

And you can argue that it is good for you.

So, it is incredibly disheartening to hear that the Food and Drug Administration is encouraging everyone to lay off peanut butter until they track down the source and breadth of a recent salmonella outbreak.

My first thought -- driven, perhaps, by my love of peanut butter and the recent tomato scare that so widely missed the mark -- is to call it a knee-jerk reaction. However, reading that 470 sicknesses, 90 hospitalizations and six deaths have been linked to it, I must grudgingly admit that some precaution should be taken.

Fortunately, I have an almost fresh jar of Jif in the pantry.