28 May—Bad news: This was included on the Stop & Shop register receipt for yesterday’s purchase:

IMPORTANT RECALL NOTICE

To Our Valued customer,
You or someone in your household may
have
purchased one of these products. The
following product has been recalled
due to
the potential to be contaminated with
Salmonella. You may return the product
to
our store for a full refund. If you
have
any questions, please contact Fresh
Start
Produce Sales at (561) 496-7250.

Cucumber – available for sale
through May 20, 2025

As it happens, I had purchased the potentially Salmonella-contaminated cucumber on 14 May, a full fortnight before I was notified of the bacterial peril and eight days after it was discovered. (The incubation period for Salmonella infection is typically from 12 to 36 hours.) Not only was yesterday’s purchase not my first at Stop & Shop since I had bought the cucumber or since the recall was announced, but Stop & Shop has my phone number—which I enter every time I check out in order to “earn” GO Points worth a penny apiece—as well as my email address.

Evidently the cucumber in question was a product of Bedner Growers Inc., of Boynton Beach, Florida, and distributed by Florida’s Fresh Start Produce Sales. So if the recall, instituted on 19 May and affecting cucumbers sold between 29 April and 14 May, was so important, why couldn’t I—and other potential victims whose identities were known—have been notified sooner by phone and/or email? Even a week could have made a difference between life and diarrhea.

Does an dilatory recall notice on a register receipt relieve Stop & Shop of liability. I should hope not.

But evidently the cucumber I’d purchased—and consumed along with other vegetables (mostly from Mexico and points south, of course) shortly thereafter with no ill effect—wasn’t in fact contaminated with Salmonella. Or I was able to resist the infection despite my advanced years.

That’s the bad news, then—at least for fans of the shameless Trump federal Republican trifecta and the shameful Connecticut state Democrat trifecta, both of which are definitely and demonstrably detrimental to the people and institutions they’re supposed to be serving . . .