I must admit I cannot stand Glenn Beck. I think he is a self-promoting, unbalanced idiot, who with his rants does great damage to what little common ground we have between the left, right and center of our country. For that reason I was a bit shocked to see the below on his website – at least for now:

Today, food safety is a serious public-health problem. The CDC estimates that food-borne disease causes about 48 million illnesses per year. Roughly one in six Americans get sick from bad food. Many of these cases are mild gastroenteritis, commonly referred to as the stomach bug. But too many food poisoning cases are more serious, resulting in approximately 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually. The fatalities are often children and the elderly.

At the same time, food recalls happen often enough nowadays that we practically have a ho-hum attitude about them. That is, unless more than a half a billion eggs are recalled and over two thousand people become sick with salmonella poisoning, which happened last year. One year before that, nine people died from a salmonella outbreak linked to a peanut-manufacturing plant, leading to the largest food recall in U.S. history. Then there’s E. coli, a potentially deadly pathogen that is no longer contained to meat. E. coli outbreaks have now been linked to spinach, unpasteurized apple juice, peppers, bagged lettuce, sprouts, raw milk, cilantro, and cheese. In 2009 E. coli even found its way into raw cookie dough.

But none of this was known back in 1993 when scores of children began showing up in Seattle-area emergency rooms with severe abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. At that time, E. coli wasn’t a reportable disease in most states. The USDA didn’t test for it in meat. Most consumers had never heard the term. That all changed when public health officials in Seattle announced that E. coli-contaminated hamburgers sold by Jack in the Box restaurants was responsible for a rash of children in Seattle hospitals.

Before the dust settled, the outbreak had spread throughout the West. Over seven hundred and fifty children were poisoned and four died. All three national news networks tracked the story, as did every major newspaper. The idea that a hamburger could be deadly was a chilling wake-up call. Amidst this environment, Bill Marler, a fledgling personal injury lawyer in Seattle, got a call from a mother of one of the children swept up in the outbreak. Marler and his wife had just had their first child. When he went to Seattle Children’s Hospital and witnessed first-hand what E. coli can do to a child, his entire approach to law and food changed.

The more I learned about Marler, the more I realized what a compelling and important story I could tell about him and the first food safety case he won. I flew out to Seattle to meet him. He picked me up in his red Volkswagen convertible – license plate “ECOLI” – and took me to his home for two days of face-to-face interviews. Before I knew it I was wrapped up in the throes of the Jack in the Box case. For the past two years I conducted over two hundred interviews with all the major players in that outbreak: the families whose children were swept up in the outbreak; the Jack in the Box executives who were at the helm at the time; the physicians and public health officials who figured out the source of the poison; and the lawyers for both sides in what became the first class-action case linked to an E. coli outbreak.

Today, E. coli is a household term and the Jack in the Box case is one that virtually every American adult remembers. But few people realize how much that case changed the way food is processed and regulated in this country. And for some of us, it changed the way we eat. But regardless of whether you remain a consumer of fast food or eat strictly organic, all of us can agree that efforts to improve food quality and food safety in the U.S. should not get short shrift from legislators and policymakers.