Working with companies to safeguard foods

This past summer, Kathy Glass and her team made batches of pepperoni in her laboratory-cum-kitchen in the Microbial Sciences Building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But it would have been a very bad idea to put her handiwork on top of a pizza. Stuffed into each casing, along with pork and spices, were E. coli bacteria, the kind that make people sick — and sometimes die.

Glass manages the UW-Madison Food Research Institute's Applied Food Safety Laboratory, where it's common practice to add dangerous bacteria and fungi to all sorts of processed foods. When her team is not lacing pepperoni with E. coli, they make contaminated cheeses and other deli meats, all in the name of protecting human health. The tainted foods help Glass study how foodborne pathogens spread through the nation's food system and search for ways to stop them.

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