Q: Are there more food recalls now? Why?
A: 2009 has been a big year for food recalls, largely because salmonella-contaminated dried milk, pistachio nuts and peanut products affected thousands of items in a wide variety of food products, says Kathleen Glass, a microbiologist and associate director of the Food Research Institute at UW-Madison. “If you have a single whole food, from one manufacturing plant or one farm, the contamination event will have a much smaller effect.”