I do news.

And now, with 100 posts on barfblog, and food safety news as prominent as ever — that’s me doing an interview for the Today show on NBC while driving back from Florida on Wednesday in a shirt borrowed from a reporter — it’s time for a recap.

The Food Safety Network — the FSnet listserv — began in my basement office while I was a graduate student. In the aftermath of the Jan. 1993 Jack-in-the-Box outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, I started sharing electronic media accounts of food safety issues with some of my colleagues through the wonders of e-mail. I had an undergraduate degree in molecular biology, had worked for years as a journalist, and as communications thingy for the Information Technology Research Centre at the University of Waterloo.

By 1994, the e-mail distribution list was growing, and we undertook a research project to see if the daily FSnet mailings actually helped front-line workers.

This was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so it was nearly impossible to get e-mail access for the various government agencies participating in the trial. However, within months, the information superhighway was commonplace, my daily e-mail was converted to a listserv distribution system, and the daily FSnet postings went out beginning in May, 1995. FSnet and the other listservs are still available to whoever wants them in their e-mail; instructions are available here.
 
FSnet archives are available at foodsafety.ksu.edu dating back to Jan. 1, 1996. In Sept. 1996, I got a professoring job, and my lab began to expand. In 1998, the Food Safety Network website was launched, and by 2000, I had enough people working on news and in my lab that we started keeping track of things.

For the last five years, we have collected approximately 25,000 media accounts, scientific papers, reports, press releases and now blog postings related to all things food safety, each and every year. That’s 125,000 individual items. About half of those items are edited and posted in the four daily listservs — FSnet, Agnet, Animalnet and FFnet.

After starting on a Mac computer in my basement, I’m now working with a small group of individuals passionately committed to reducing the incidence of foodborne illness. Wireless instead of dial-up means that we work in our living rooms or rooms around the world. And we have nicer Macs now.

From produce to peanut butter and pet food, imports and outbreaks, my colleagues and students provide commentary about food safety issues from farm to fork. We want to make food safety a pop-culture phenomenon and change the way the world thinks about food. Through barfblog, we comment daily on food safety happenings including such categories such as celebrity barf and the "yuck" factor. Through donteatpoop.com, we encourage people to wash their hands, and not eat poop.

The first 100 posts on barfblog are just a beginning. And thanks to Bill Marler for his on-going support of our blogging efforts.