Powder on the Peanuts

We received a mid Friday afternoon call from an agitated trucking company dispatcher outlining a problem he hoped we could solve. His firm had hauled a number of sealed shipping containers of nuts for a snack food manufacturer from a strike disrupted large city docks. On arrival at the manufacturers receiving scales the containers were found to have a layer of white powder spread over their contents. Someone on the dock jokingly suggested, sabotage with strychnine by the militant strikers and a health inspector within hearing quarantined the whole lot until the white powder was identified. Six flat bed trailers were stuck in the factory parking lot indefinitely and were due somewhere else on Saturday. Shortly after the telephone call a cigar puffing, stout man, in suspender coveralls with a friar tuck hair line, short sleeved Hawaiian shirt and a very "salty" vocabulary arrived at our door with a plastic bag of white powder and mixed nuts.

The white, perfectly water-soluble compound was not the feared poison. It exhibited odd behavior in simple physical tests, which finally indicated to us a low molecular weight, highly polar, sodium salt species.

The compound was identified as mono sodium glutamate and was added to the containers by the suppliers. The nuts were quite good.


Contamination of Foodstuffs

We received a request from an insurance adjuster to examine the stock in a health food store, which had been the scene of a break and enter. The storeowner had suffered a small cash loss and had submitted a substantial claim suggesting that his entire stock had been sabotaged through contamination and that he would be out of business until his inventory could be disposed of and replaced.

The adjuster queried the suggested contamination of the stock and we were asked to provide assistance. The stock was properly sampled then examined by visual light microscopy and any surface additives were chemically analyzed for identification. No evidence of contamination was found and all the materials adhering to surfaces were identified as sugars or preservatives.