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By Root 1174 0

but its aftermath remains vivid. Within hours, all but one of us became violently ill. I will spare the details, as nearly everyone has had a similar experience. A flurry of telephone calls the next day made it clear that we were not the only ones who suffered after that dinner. In retrospect, what seems most remarkable about that event was how ordinary it was. We survived. We felt better in a day or two. We did not report our illness to health authorities, and neither did anyone else. We did not try to trace the source of the outbreak (although our one son who did not become ill, and who ate nothing green in those days, insisted that the salad must have been at fault).

We assumed that minor food poisonings were a normal part of daily living; they were low on our dread-and-outrage scale. It did not occur to us that microbial illness transmitted by food might be anything more serious than a minor inconvenience and a mess to clean up. If we gave any thought to cholera, typhoid, or botulism (let alone anthrax), we viewed them as diseases of the past, eliminated by basic public health measures such as water chlorination, milk pasteurization, or canning at appropriate temperatures. We were quite unaware of the emerging bacterial pathogens that I discuss in these chapters. At the time, if we worried at all about food safety, it was about agricultural pesticides or food additives—the chemical colors, flavors, and preservatives then increasingly used to make processed foods look and taste better. We were not alone in worrying about food additives: a 1979 report recommended a complete revision of the food safety laws to strengthen our ability to control the use of food chemicals such as saccharin, the artificial sweetener that had just been linked to cancer risk.1

Additives and pesticides remained primary public safety concerns through the mid-1980s. Dr. David Kessler, who later became commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said that food safety laws needed an overhaul to control food additives—without even mentioning microbial hazards. Surveys of public attitudes toward food safety often asked about additives and pesticides but rarely probed knowledge or opinions about bacterial pathogens. When the surveys did include such questions, most people continued to rank additives and pesticides first among food safety concerns. At the time, less than 1% of food samples contained chemical additives and pesticides at “unacceptable” levels. Even if such levels were still too high—and any level of pesticides in food continues to raise safety questions—harm from food chemicals paled in comparison to that caused by pathogens. In the late 1980s, health officials found Salmonella in one-third of all poultry and estimated that 33 million Americans experienced at least one episode of foodborne microbial illness each year.2

A few farsighted advocacy groups such as the Community Nutrition Institute in Washington, DC, pressed for more action to prevent pathogens from entering the food supply. They were aware of the emergence in the early 1980s of an especially nasty variant of Escherichia coli (E. coli), usually a relatively harmless inhabitant of the human digestive tract. As reports of toxic pathogens in food became more frequent, food safety priorities began to shift. By 1989, both Time and Newsweek had published cover stories on microbial food hazards. In 1991, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which had led public debate about food additives, published a consumer guide to food safety with exceptionally clear instructions about what needed to be done to prevent foodborne infections.3

In the early 1990s, such publicity encouraged Congress to introduce more than 30 bills—a record number—related to food safety, and at least eight states were trying to develop their own rules. Ellen Haas, then president of the consumer advocacy group Public Voice, called food safety “not just a kitchen issue anymore.”4 At the time, federal officials ranked microbial hazards first among food safety issues, residues of animal