In 1993 hundreds of children on the Pacific coast became sick after eating undercooked hamburgers served by Jack In The Box restaurants. The meat was found to be contaminated with a dangerous form of E.coli bacteria. Four children ultimately died. The company that owned the fast-food chain revamped its safety operations and eventually paid millions of dollars to settle legal claims brought by families of the victims. California, following the lead of other states, passed a law establishing minimum cooking temperatures for preparing hamburgers.

Unfortunately, the Jack In The Box case was not an isolated incident. Every week almost two hundred people in the United States, most of them children or elderly, die from diseases that were contracted from eating tainted food. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that between 6 million and 33 million people each year come...