When You Really Think About It, Everything Makes You Poop (by Taylor Farms)

“Taylor Farms is recalling items containing jalapeños sold at major retailers over Salmonella risk. The salad company, which recently recalled certain lettuce products amid the ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak, announced on Aug. 9 that it is recalling its products made with jalapeños due to potential Salmonella contamination amid a multistate outbreak.” – People

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Yes, we know we’re in the news again, but before everybody starts pointing fingers with the hand that isn’t clutching their abdomen, we’d like to offer a little perspective.

Since our ancestors first dragged themselves out of the primordial muck and discovered that things could be chewed, food has gone in one end and out the other. Digestion is not a Taylor Farms innovation. We did not invent the intestine, set the bowel in motion, or decide that every lunch you will ever eat should eventually become something you flush.

Sometimes the process moves with greater urgency than anyone would prefer. Sometimes you finish dinner at 7:42 and by 8:06 you are waddling through your home with pants around your ankles, bargaining with muscles you did not realize you had. Our bodies, unique snowflakes all, contain a myriad of mysteries.

But now people keep using phrases like “explosive diarrhea.” Fine. That is certainly one way to put it. English has also given us “movement,” “evacuation,” “constitutional,” “deposit” and “Code Brown.” There is even the domestic classic, “I’m gonna be in here awhile, honey.” Our language is rich with ways to put a civilized gloss on uncivilized events. Why seize upon the scariest available terminology simply because your small intestine has turned into a Super Soaker?

Shit happens. It always has. We reject the implication that stool consistency should somehow reflect upon the character of the company that allegedly processed your jalapeños through a porta-potty. Some days, you produce something so structurally magnificent you glance back with the pride of a civil engineer. Other days, the toilet bowl evokes a Jackson Pollock retrospective. Are we really going to make Taylor Farms answer for the entire expressive range of the human anus?

Remember, gastrointestinal intensity is subjective. One person’s medical event is another person taking their shirt off because things have gotten serious. Your great-grandfather probably called that Tuesday. He didn’t have a smartphone to search “Why am I seeing stars on the toilet?” He had a dog-eared Reader’s Digest and the understanding that sometimes the Lord tests a man as if he were Job from the waist down.

Today, everyone sees the name Taylor Farms and suddenly becomes the Hercule Poirot of the commode. You had our guacamole at noon. You experienced what you describe as a bowel emergency of unprecedented violence at 12:07. Case closed, you say. Interesting detective work. Seven minutes and a stomach cramp, and suddenly you’re Bob Woodward exposing a different kind of Watergate.

As for our vast network of private-label products appearing beneath countless different store brands, we’re surprised anyone would view that negatively. We prefer to think of ourselves as the Batman of produce: everywhere, essential, operating under a variety of identities, and occasionally associated with guano in a cave. If anything, discovering that we made the guacamole you never knew we made should inspire awe at our operational scale, not suspicion about your sudden need to lie naked on the bathroom tile.

Ultimately, we believe America needs to restore a little humility to the bathroom. Everybody poops. There is an entire children’s book about it. Everybody has made an unfortunate noise in a public restroom and then remained absolutely motionless until the other person left. Everybody, at some point, has looked into the bowl and wondered whether what just happened requires a doctor, a plumber, or last rites.

So, before you blame Taylor Farms for whatever is presently rocketing through your alimentary canal, consider the possibility that human digestion is complicated and causation is difficult to establish.

Actually, hang on. Didn’t you have Taco Bell last Thursday?

Well, there you go. Case closed.