During WRC-TV’s Thursday-evening piece on the first big Salmonella Outbreak of 2007, as Wendy Rieger and Jim Handly read out the serial numbers from the bad batch of peanut butter—-“2…1…1…1…”—-I reached for the jar of Peter Pan atop my fridge.

Yup: “2111” was printed on the lid of the half-eaten 40 oz. tub of creamy I’d purchased in the Columbia Heights Giant a few months ago.

It was just like hitting Lotto, only instead of millions of dollars, the payout was billions of potentially fatal bacteria. And in this case, feeling like a winner could also mean suffering acute symptoms such as “the sudden onset of nausea, abdominal cramping, and bloody diarrhea with mucous.”