Hmm, maybe floor sealant is an unheralded cure for leaky gut syndrome?
Given the choice I think I’d rather eat semen-tainted dressing than floor sealant milk.
My employer also requires that containers be properly labeled. Not a fireable offense, since we don’t deal with food processing - but still a matter of safety and good laboratory practices.
Not clear what happened in Alaska, i.e. was this stuff improperly labeled as milk (in which case the server should be off the hook), not labeled at all (in which case the server should be held liable), or clearly labeled but not read (in which case the server should be held liable).
Also, presumably someone went into a fridge to get milk and came out with this stuff instead. Why would floor sealant have been stored in a fridge at all? Maybe this was a case of two instances in which someone didn’t read the label: first when putting bags of sealant in the fridge, and then one more time when loading the bags into the milk dispenser.
I Googled “water based floor sealant”, and got this:
At least one milk dispenser system out there uses bags like this:
https://www.officejava.com/PRO-2032-17323
There’s a size difference (5 gal vs. 1 gal), but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that other sizes are available, and somehow this school ended up with sealant and milk in bags of the same size (or that some zombie didn’t seem to notice that today’s milk bag was unusually small). Looking at the closures on those bags, it’s entirely possible that the milk dispenser nozzle fitted the floor sealant bag very nicely.
My first question after all this would be, why do milk and floor sealant come in similar enough packaging that this is even possible?
Hence the outrage: the students weren’t given a choice.
Probably because it’s the most economical packaging for either product, and because regulations don’t forbid it. Until today, food safety regulators likely had not considered (or dismissed as unlikely) a triple failure sequence: namely, that toxic sealant would be stored in a place where someone might look for milk (that by itself is probably already against regs), that the sealant’s packaging would be compatible with the milk dispenser, and that someone would load a bag of sealant into the milk dispenser without reading the label.
From the more informative WaPo article (gift link):
[The school district] said that one pallet of floor sealant had been “mistakenly delivered” in Spring 2021 to an off campus warehouse where school district food supplies are stored, “at the same time as four pallets of shelf stable milk.”
“The pallet of floor sealant remained untouched in storage with other food products until this week when NMS ran short on milk and sent staff to retrieve shelf stable milk.”
On Tuesday morning one box of the floor sealant in the pallet was delivered to a food worker at the day care and others were sent to 2 other nearby schools but “they remained unopened.”
What I find interesting is the non-scientific poll attached to the linked article from the OP. It asks whether or not the poll-takers thought this was done intentionally or accidentally. The results of the poll indicated that 56% of respondents thought it was done intentionally, and only 26% thought it was accidental. (The rest either weren’t sure or had no opinion.)
I know it’s just an online poll, but are people really that gullible and/or paranoid that they honestly think this was done intentionally?
I could tell right away what happened. A bag of sealant like this one was used to refill the milk dispenser instead of an actual milk bag. I have a similar experience as this. I once replaced the orange juice bag with a similar looking, clear plastic bag of eggs. Not toxic, but still gross.
Slightly weird to me that the school relies on a catering company for meals. When I was in grade school in the 1970s, as far as I knew, the food we ate was prepared and served by school employees (lunch ladies, in other words).
It’s not uncommon today for school systems to hire a food service vendor (a.k.a. caterer) to operate their lunch program. Sodexo, which is one of the big names in food service, has an entire division focusing on providing food service for K-12 schools.
(Amusingly, on preview, I see that the header on their webpage appears to have an undeleted comment from being reviewed by someone within the company.)
I recently went to my local AMPM gas station for gas and a soda, went to the fountain drink dispenser, but the Pepsi button but Mountain Dew came out. Then I hit the Mountain Dew button and Pepsi came out. And I thought the employees at my gas station really screwed up!
Did the water taste like floor sealant?
Packing is made in fairly standard sizes and styles and the milk producer and floor sealant producer just happened to pick similar packaging?
Meh, probably common these days. Using a catering company means the school doesn’t have to maintain a kitchen themselves, or cooks/food handlers. In some circumstances it may be more cost-efficient.
My family moved around a bit when I was young. Even in the 1970’s there were schools that had in-school kitchens and others that had system-central kitchens and food was prepared then shipped out to the various schools. Using a catering company isn’t that much different.
I get that. And I get that the bag of sealant can fit in the spot that the milk bag would take up. What doesn’t make sense is the the nozzle on the chemical bag could fit the spigot of the milk dispenser.
I understand that using outside caterers is common. When I was a kid war movies and TV shows like MASH showed members of the armed forces making and serving the food and I expect that the Defense Department also outsources that role now.
And has for decades.
I caught this transition 20 years ago within US Army services while I was assigned to a joint command post inside a mountain, operated by the Army. The first year of my tour, food services were provided by uniformed soldiers, food was high-quality, and cost was flat-fee for all you could take on one tray.
Then that chow hall transitioned to a contractor. Prices went up, everything became a la carte, and quality… it’s the only place I saw cockroaches baked onto strips of oven-fried bacon and where I was served a brown egg. Not a brown-shelled egg, a boiled egg where the “white” was medium beige and smelled of literal rotten eggs. So a rotten boiled egg.
Pretty good indicator of what “lowest bidder” means.
But hey, they saved lots of money!