For Real?

FDA recalls some foods with flavor enhancer HVP

(CNN) -- Federal health authorities announced Thursday the recall of a commonly used flavor enhancer after samples of the product were found to contain salmonella.

"I would say it's likely to be in thousands of food products," said Dr. Jenny Scott, senior adviser to the director at the Office of Food Safety at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, about the product, called hydrolyzed vegetable protein, also called HVP.

This does not bode well. It sounds like this is something that could be very big, albeit not terribly dangerous. There's a list of possibly contaminated products; there's not a lot of affected items at present time (and, on a personal note, nothing I'm interested in...) It's hard to say if this is a minor blip on the food front or a major problem as of yet, but it looks like it's not terrifically dangerous.

What jumped out at me was this, though:

"We are working hard to respond to this particular outbreak; we also are working hard to put in place the kinds of preventive control measures to prevent this kind of contamination from happening in the first place," said FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg.

The head of the FDA is named Hamburg? Go on!

That is all.