The Great Luncheon Meat Disaster of '24

A food crisis hits me where it hurts

This is one of the greatest things I have ever read in a press statement:

First and foremost, our investigation has identified the root cause of the contamination as a specific production process that only existed at the Jarratt facility and was used only for liverwurst. With this discovery, we have decided to permanently discontinue liverwurst.

The emphasis is in the original and it sells the paragraph. 

This comms masterpiece is from a statement released yesterday by the food company Boar’s Head, which is dealing with a crisis regarding listeria contamination of liverwurst manufactured at a facility in Virginia.

One general rule in crisis communications is that you should clearly explain the actions you will take to remediate the problem. “We have decided to permanently discontinue liverwurst.” That’s an action! This step was so important that it was the first of three remedial steps covered in that press release. The second was that they are permanently closing the facility and apparently laying off several hundred people. Naturally, that’s the headline the press went with. Still, if you’re going to bury the lede, bury it under liverwurst! 

The third step is an expert committee. Might as well play the hits.

Look, crisis PR is hard, and food crisis PR is really hard because food is about trust and what you put in your body and your childrens’ bodies. One of the roughest professional weeks of my life was working (in a relatively junior role) for a major food client impacted by the contamination of the Chinese dairy supply chain with melamine. It was some of the highest ambient stress I have ever encountered.

When it’s leafy greens being recalled for contamination people are often surprised because, you know, greens! But when it’s luncheon meat I guess it tracks. There are a lot of meat products in the FDA recall database. Meat processing seems hard. What is the “specific production process that only existed at the Jarratt facility and was used only for liverwurst?” The imagination runs wild!

I’m obsessing about this not because of any deep interest in the PR craft of this situation, but because I love liverwurst.

No, really! When I was in college I would make myself sandwiches of liverwurst and alfalfa sprouts with a generous spread of yellow mustard. Don’t judge it until you’ve tried it! I ate these sandwiches on the beach at Año Nuevo when I was surveying elephant seal pup mortality. To be honest, they don’t really hold up well to being stuffed in a backpack all day. Too much moisture. Better to go with the salami for days in the field. But the mustard helps to cover up the stench of elephant seal.

I don’t eat much liverwurst anymore. This is partly because as I got older I couldn’t make the same dietary choices. There is a point in your life when you can have (totally random example) a Slurpee, or a Charleston Chew Bar, or a Slurpee and a Charleston Chew bar. That point is when you are a teenager and you spend a lot of time hanging out in front of the 7-11 in midtown Palo Alto with your buddies, getting jacked on the worst possible snacks to prepare for endless hours of gaming on the Atari 2600. And then there is the rest of your life spent having the salad dressing on the side because adulthood is a gray and joyless desert inhabited by wandering hermits who are concerned about your prostate.

Also, I got fancier as I got older. I slid down the fatty slope from liverwurst (extruded meat product) to Braunschweiger¹ (sounds German!) to rarefied patés and terrines best enjoyed on nuggets of artisan bread from craft bakeries staffed by Berkeley Hills Hobbits who grind their own flour with millstones and magic wheat imported from the Shire. It’s the same nutritional content as those sandwiches from my youth, but it feels way healthier because it has “texture” and costs 25 times as much.

Anyway, I haven’t been following the comms on the case closely, and I don’t have strong opinions one way or the other on how Boar’s Head is handling it. But the fact that liverwurst was determined to be at the center forced me to pay attention.

It’s for the best that I’m not involved in this situation. I am good at distancing myself emotionally from the crises I work on, which is important if you do this kind of work. But for liverwurst I might struggle to maintain that distance. Imagine the press conference!

Reporter: “What steps will you take to ensure this never happens again?”

Me [gripping sides of the podium, pale in the TV lights, one tear rolling down my cheek]: “We…we have decided to…permanently discontinue liverwurst.”

[Crowd gasps]

Me [openly sobbing]: “No further questions.”

The old saying is true. You really don’t want to see the sausage being made.

1. Is liverwurst technically “luncheon meat?” Idk, but according to the exhaustive list of luncheon meats on Wikipedia (so good!), Braunschweiger is. US Braunschweiger, unlike its German namesake, is basically liverwurst so I’m going with it!