This column won’t pass the Cheerios Test. That’s the old newspaper industry rule of thumb that says the morning paper shouldn’t ruin the reader’s breakfast. Subjects that turn the stomach are supposedly off limits, but I’m claiming an exemption to talk about food safety, a subject that is all about turning stomachs.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems we’ve been hearing a lot in recent months about outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella. We’ve had national problems with contaminated green onions, pre-washed salad greens and peanut butter finding their way into the commercial food supply.

Recalls have sent grocers scrambling to remove the suspect foods from their stores, making consumers think twice about serving their children a PB&J or a ready-made salad.

And it is disconcerting. This is America, and we expect not to have to worry about where our next meal will come from or – gasp – whether the food will be clean.

For those of us who think of pets as family members, the recent pet food scare reinforced this concern. It is important to note that the human food problems have been bacteria-related – what are called food-borne illnesses – while the pet food issues occurred when toxins turned up in pet food ingredients. While they aren’t the same problem, the pet food scare rattled consumers’ confidence once again.

The food-safety issue hit closer to home recently when a friend spent the night in the emergency room being pumped full of fluids to combat severe dehydration. She had become violently ill shortly after eating chicken that had been fine when she had eaten part of it in a restaurant on a Wednesday but apparently not so fine when she pulled it out of her refrigerator the following Saturday. While many of us have done the same thing to no ill effect, in this instance it took my friend three days to recover.

So I started doing a little bit of Internet research on the food safety issue. When the media report on foodborne illnesses, they focus on outbreaks that can be traced to name brands like Taco Bell and Peter Pan or to large-scale vegetable producers. What we don’t hear about are people like my friend, which is too bad because her situation is a fairly common and serious problem.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that each year, 76 million people get sick from something they eat, more than 300,000 must be hospitalized and 5,000 die. In almost 60 percent of the cases that can be traced to a source, the food is eaten outside of the home. The risk increases for large meals when food is left out for long periods of time as well as for consumption of leftovers.

Some of the most interesting data were a bit old. The CDC has a database for the years 1991 to 1995 that can be sorted by state. In Kansas during those years we had no more than two reported incidents per year, but the data tell little stories. In 1991, for example, 50 people got sick from eating banana cream pie at a nursing home, and in 1992, 15 people ate salmonella-tainted ice cream at a social.

If those numbers from the early 1990s still reflect the foodborne illness situation in Kansas, they suggest that incidents that cause groups of people to become ill are more likely to be reported, become statistics and receive media attention. Missing from our awareness are all the individual sufferers like my friend, who ate bad chicken in the privacy of her own kitchen.

Even with the outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli that have been traced to the commercial food supply chain, whether we get sick from eating food is more likely to be determined locally – in our own kitchens, at the church social or neighborhood potluck, or at our favorite restaurant.

The CDC and other government agencies have good Web sites with lots of information. One of the most informative is www.FoodSafety.gov, which is operated by the Food Safety Inspection Service. While much of the content is a refresher on what we learned in junior high home economics, it is worth taking a look.