It wasn't until a neighbor heard on the news that the Odwalla Co. was recalling products containing unpasteurized apple juice that Dimock did a little epidemiological sleuthing of her own. She went back to the bagel shop in Colorado where they'd stopped on the way to Brian's kindergarten a week before he fell ill. There in the refrigerator case was the Odwalla juice she'd picked out for her boy.  Dimock, now living in Potomac, wasn't in the mood to blame anyone. "I was in shock; we were all terrified that we'd lose Brian," she said. After a while, shock turned into anger, then a feeling of uncertainty. "When you lose trust in your food, you lose trust in a lot of things," she said. The Dimocks were parties in a lawsuit against Odwalla that resulted in a settlement.  Whatever our politics, we increasingly eat from a communal kitchen. Once upon a time, winter holidays and church get-togethers were some of the only times that large numbers of us shared the same food. Now, busy Americans rely heavily upon restaurants and prepared foods, and more and more of that food comes from highly centralized operations. A sloppy job in such a kitchen can cause a nationwide epidemic.  The Odwalla poisonings, which killed one child and sickened at least 65 other people, followed close on the heels of the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak, in which four children died and 700 people got sick after eating undercooked hamburgers tainted with the same microorganism that contaminated Odwalla's juice. Since then, a steady roll call of food-borne illness outbreaks and recalls of contaminated products have awakened consumers to the potential dangers of eating almost anything.  Unlike several of the children poisoned by Odwalla's juice, Brian Dimock was relatively lucky. After three weeks in the hospital being treated for hemolytic uremia syndrome, a potentially deadly attack on the kidneys, he recovered, and the illness certainly didn't stunt his growth. Now nearly 19, Brian is a cheerful, strapping 6-foot-5, with size 15 basketball shoes. Yet hemolytic uremia is associated with a number of long-term health issues, and Brian wonders whether the herniated disk, stomach pains and learning disabilities he has suffered might be linked to his kidney problems. "The thing is, I'll never really know," says Dimock, who now works, of all things, as a delicatessen manager in Northwest Washington.
If you were planning to serve shrimp during the holidays, you might not want to talk to Michael Doyle, director of the Food Safety Center at the University of Georgia. You see, most of the shrimp...