This week in bacterial contaminations (and other alarming food issues): bottled water, hamburger patties and Halloween Kisses

It hasn’t been a great week for the health and safety of Canadian consumers. It has, however, been an awesome week for dangerous bacterial agents and random foreign bodies, which have been found thriving in a wide array of everyday Canadian grocery items. Over the past week, the following products have been ID’ed as unsafe for consumption: Our Compliments brand frozen hamburger patties, which are suspected of harbouring the same strain of E-coli responsible for seven deaths in Walkerton, Ontario, in 2000; Gaia brand water, which is apparently still being sold in Toronto bars and restaurants despite a two-month-old health order that found the water “unfit to drink” due to “heavy bacterial overgrowth”; and, perhaps most terrifying, some of those weird individually wrapped orange-and-black Halloween candies known as Kisses (these Kisses, not these Kisses), which were found by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to contain “harmful pieces of metal,” making them a potentially fatal (as opposed to just disappointing) Halloween treat.