Dallas Morning News, "Conagra Plant photos stir salmonella outbreak debate"

          Three months after a nationwide salmonella outbreak was tied to tainted peanut butter, nearly 2,000 people from North Texas say they were sickened and have hired attorneys to represent them, according to a Texas lawyer who runs a legal-solicitation Web site. As concern about food safety circulates in the news, Congress and the courts and attornies are trying to swing the public debate. They argue that the food poisoning cases are not isolated incidents but a result of pervasively unsanitary conditions at food-production plants.
          And at the center of their claims are a video and photographs – shot two months after the Sylvester, Ga., peanut butter plant shut down – depicting squalid conditions at the plant where the salmonella contamination occurred: a dead rodent, roaches crawling on the peanuts, a leaky ceiling, brown streaks running down the walls. "They clearly show a different story than the one that ConAgra is telling the public," said the lawyer. "My theory is you had a pretty nasty, unsanitary place and because of that, you had a salmonella problem that made everybody sick."
          But are the pictures an accurate portrayal of the factory when it was producing the peanut butter that sickened customers across the country? ConAgra, which produced the Peter Pan and Great Value brands of peanut butter, says it's not. "The plant had been closed for two months prior to the lawyers coming in to inspect the facility themselves," ConAgra spokeswoman Stephanie Childs said. "Any facility we operate has to meet standards for cleanliness and for producing a safe and quality product." The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not released a report on its inspection of the plant from Feb. 14 to March 2, immediately after the recall, and the case remains under investigation.