So, we bought this for the back of the upcoming Seattle Magazine:

Screen Shot 2011-12-01 at 10.10.28 PM.pngGo to Amazon and buy the book – Poisoned – the story behind the Jack in the Box E. coli Outbreak.

And, on the news front – it has been a long, long week:

The Packer:

Even the industry’s most ardent critic, Bill Marler of the law firm Marler Clark, was recently quoted as saying the following, “The fact that they’re testing product and pulling it off the shelves before it sickens people indicates they are moving in the right direction.”

MSNBC:

“After 20 years of doing this, businesses and governments always want to get bad news out when people will least notice,” said Bill Marler, a leading food safety lawyer based in Seattle.

It should be no surprise that companies would try to announce recalls when consumers might be otherwise occupied, said Marler, and, to be fair, holiday pressures could have contributed to the timing.

“It is certainly possible that holiday time off got in the way of alerting the public to problems,” he said.

Whether it was accidental or intentional, however, it’s not much comfort to families who may have served recalled food at their Thanksgiving dinners.

“Either alternative does not give the consumer much faith in the system, I am afraid,” Marler added.

USA Today:

While the idea is good, it just doesn’t make economic sense for producers to spend the money, says Bill Marler, the Seattle lawyer who’s made a career of prosecuting food-safety cases.

But overall outbreaks linked to O157:H7 are dropping, and most are never tracked back to the food that caused them. “The chance of getting caught for poisoning people from E. coli is really small, so there’s really no incentive” to invest in these preventive steps, says Marler.

Seattle Weekly:

“Raw milk is one of those food products, like raw hamburger, that really is just inherently dangerous,” says Seattle food safety attorney Bill Marler, whose name recently appeared on New York Times columnist Mark Bittman’s list of reasons for food activists to be thankful. Marler has been contacted by two of the families affected by the Cozy Vale outbreak.

“These are not bellyaches,” Marler says. “This is acute kidney failure. These are very sick kids.”