At noon on Jan. 19, 1993, William Jefferson Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd President of the U.S. A few hours later, the King County Health Department in Washington State issued a public warning linking consumption of undercooked hamburgers with an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, sometimes known as hamburger disease. What came to be known as the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak eventually killed four young children and sickened over 700.

Those two events, more than any other, dramatically changed the public discussion of food safety in the U.S. The Jack-in-the-Box outbreak had all the elements of a dramatic story: children were involved; the risk was relatively unknown and unfamiliar; and a sense of outrage developed in response to the inadequacy of the government inspection system. The newly inaugurated President Clinton made microbial food safety a Presidential issue.

Today, the N.Y. Times is reporting in a larger story about food safety and federal regulatory oversight, that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first presidential candidate to make food safety reform a part of a campaign platform.

In addition to signing on to a bill to create a single food inspection agency by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, Senator Clinton said in a telephone interview that she would double the agency’s budget over five years, double the number of inspectors, mandate a minimum frequency for inspections and provide mandatory recall authority.

Hillary Clinton told the Times that, "We’ve had a long history of problems with food safety because of the divided system,  But it was not as acute a problem in the minds of many Americans because we didn’t have so many outbreaks of food-related illness. There has not been much support from the Bush administration, and now we are playing catch-up. We need a new system of food safety prevention.”