How Safe is Safe?         The United States believes that it has the safest food in the world. Maybe so, maybe not. Eachyear one in four citizens suffers from a food-related illness, and some 5,000 people die fromsomething they ate. From field to kitchen, risks crop up everywhere.        The chief topics of discussion one midsummer afternoon in a conference room at the Centersfor Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are ground beef, eggs, salad, a kind of nut called analmond, and a green plant called cilantro used to flavor dishes. This is not a conversation about thelunch menu, but a review of nationwide occurrences of disease caused by food. At the table are 26epidemiologists – medical detectives charged with investigating the mysterious links betweencontaminated foods and the illnesses they trigger.        The stories are not those you might expect to hear, of people getting sick from drinking rawmilk or eating food left too long in the hot sun at a picnic. Instead, they are accounts of people madesick by eating ordinary fruits and vegetables such as oranges and tomatoes, or from consumingcarefully-prepared foods such as salads, hamburgers, and chicken dishes. The problem foods wereserved in kitchens, restaurants and nursing homes, and at churches, temples, family gatherings andchild-care centers. They were distributed to many towns, in many states nationwide.        On the face of it, you would not associate the word 'risk' with eating, an essential part of life.However, in recent years we've been presented with troubling information about a wide variety ofthe dangerous substances found in our food supply. For example, chemicals used to kill pestsremain on our fruits and troubling amounts of poisonous metals appear in our fish. Althoughskeptics point out that some of them shown were to be false shortly after being announced, most ofus of find it hard to be optimistic about the safety of our food supply. A revolution in the way ourfood is produced and prepared has led to a compromise in food safety (and some say nutrition),where problems could start even before the foods have reached the supermarket.You may think you know enough about safe eating. You may be diligent about buying safefoods and cleaning and cooking them properly. You know which dishes to order in restaurants andwhich to avoid. But the food safety experts and the epidemiologists at the CDC may not agree withyou. They want you to rethink the way you view food and make safe food practices an integral partof your everyday life.People who grew up in the last century may remember how delicious home-baked cookies are.They also probably remember eating cookie dough, that sweet, melting mix of butter, brown sugar,and raw eggs. They probably licked the bowl frequently over the years with no ill effect, thewisdom being that one should avoid only raw eggs with broken shells which might allow poisonsin.        But now food experts agree that even a perfect egg may not be safe. It may contain Salmonellaenteritidis which can cause fever and serious stomach problems, even a life-threatening infection. Itcan get originate from the chicken itself, infecting her eggs before the shells are formed. It is nowcompulsory that all eggs sold in the U.S. carry a safe-handling label telling people to keep them in the refrigerator, and to cook all foods containing eggs thoroughly before eating them to diminish therisks of falling ill.       These precautions notwithstanding, a 1994 case involving contaminated ice cream caused oneof the largest occurrences of salmonella poisoning ever recorded. Trucks transporting the premix forSchwan's, a widely distributed brand of ice cream, carried traces of raw eggs contaminated withSalmonella enteritidis. The outbreak sickened an estimated 224,000 people in 48 states. Of coursethis doesn't mean we should stop eating ice cream or other foods we love. They're just a reminderthat we should always think about possible risks in the foods we eat and make wise decisions aboutwhat we put in our mouths.
【題組】41. The story is mainly about ____.
(A) the CDC and how it does its job
(B) pests that threaten our food
(C) compulsory labeling of food products
(D) threats to the safety of our food