F ood safety is something most Americans take for granted. But that confidence is shaken when there’s an outbreak of a food-borne illness, like the Listeria infection in Colorado cantaloupes last year that left 32 people dead. There’s plenty of reason to be concerned. One of every six people becomes ill each year from eating contaminated foods, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease ...

When I was a young lad in the 1930s, our family used to spend the summer holidays at a cottage in Milton Eonan, Glenlyon, Perthshire. There was no electricity and water was pumped up into the cottage from the Milton Burn by a contraption known as the Ram. Powered by the gravity flow of unlimited water from the burn above, it maintained an intermittent jet of water into the attic tank; or rather...