If the economy gets any worse, we’ll all be eating peanuts. They’re cheap and nutritious. But these days, they can be deadly.

Peanuts are under assault by manufacturers who have no respect for America’s favorite comfort food or the well being of their fellow Americans. When the FBI starts raiding peanut plants for salmonella food poisoning you know the situation is out of control at a time when peanut products need more protection than ever given the state of the economy.

In some respects, Africa is better off than we are when it comes to peanuts. What does Africa have to do with it? Read on. But first, a reprise of American values.

An assault on peanut butter is an assault on deeply held American values dating back to at least the 1950s when the popular TV show “Leave It to Beaver” set the standard for suburban home life in the United States. Who didn’t fix peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their kids’ lunches back in the day? And who doesn’t today? Kids prefer peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to any others.

The BLT is no substitute. Bacon has to be cooked. Peanut butter just slathers on bread with no muss or fuss or skillet to clean up after lunch. And talk about nutrition! Peanuts are so nutritious that they are saving thousands of little lives in Africa where drought, poverty and civil war are starving entire populations. In Africa, the big eyes of listless kids and infants with distended bellies stare back at the cameras of TV news crews from all over the world on the continent to document the disaster.

But peanuts are coming to the rescue. “Plumpynut,” a rich nutritious peanut butter-like mixture of ground peanuts, sugar, milk solids and vitamins that can be swiped into little mouths almost too weak to open is saving them. Children, otherwise doomed to die of starvation, perk up in a matter of days. They smile and begin to play. Doctors Without Borders called Plumpynut an “essential medicine” in a 60 Minutes report last year about starvation in Niger.

Given our terrible economic dilemma, with 600,000 jobs lost last month alone, why aren’t we protecting peanuts in America? Americans eat more than 800 million pounds of peanut butter every year. That’s enough to coat the floor of the Grand Canyon according to www.hugsandhope.org a website that is chock full of facts about peanuts. We may need to eat more.

So how does the stimulus bill figure in? It should have funds to beef up (is that a pun?) the budget of the Food and Drug Administration, supposedly Americans’ first line of defense against contaminated foods. When salmonella gets into peanuts and peanut products, as it has twice in the last two years – not to mention tomatoes and Mexican Serrano chili peppers – and hundreds of Americans get sick and some die, the FDA isn’t doing its job of finding the contaminants and stopping companies from selling them all over America. Reader’s Digest devoted 12 pages to an investigative report about deficiencies with the FDA in its April 2008 issue. Now there’s an American institution. At least we can rely on Readers Digest.

Now that this grandmother works for a personal injury lawyer who handles salmonella food poisoning cases, I have become much more aware of how easily contaminated foods, products, drugs and defective devices are slipping by the FDA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to sicken and kill Americans. Remember all the toy recalls due to lead in Chinese-made toys at Christmas in 2007? What is the world coming to when I can’t make a peanut butter sandwich for a grandchild like I did for her mother back in the day? I say beef up the stimulus bill to protect peanuts.

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