It’s Christmas and time for Food Safety News to present its second annual Nice List.  

For the nice, being on our Nice List is as good as it gets, although those named should not expect anything more (from us) than this:

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Merry Christmas from all of us at Food Safety News!

(If you missed the Naughty List, turn back to our Christmas Eve edition.)

NICE: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, who in the end, fulfilled his promise to E. coli victim Linda Rivera by pushing the food safety bill through the Senate.

NICE: Rep.John Dingell,D-MI, chairman emeritus of the Commerce and Energy Committee, for steering food safety legislation through the House and on to the President’s desk, even when it had to be done without a Conference Committee with the Senate.

NICE: Senators Richard Durbin, R-IL, and Tom Harkin, D-IA, who knocked down obstacle after obstacle to keep food safety reform alive, especially at those times when it appeared to be doomed.

NICE: Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, the leading advocate for a single federal food safety agency, for her willingness to push for needed reforms while not letting the imperfect be the enemy of the good.

NICE: AMI president J. Patrick Boyle, for telling a television comedy audience that he would not order a rare hamburger.

NICE: Michael Moss and staff of New York Times, for winning the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for telling the story of Minnesota dance instructor Stephanie Smith, whose life was forever changed by an E. coli O157:H7 infection.

NICE: Oyster expert Ed Cake, who helped Food Safety News following the April 20 BP oil spill and who continues to help us follow what’s happening with Gulf seafood.

NICE: Dr. Dean Wyatt, the Food Safety and Inspection Service veterinarian who blew the whistle on USDA looking the other way the inhumane treatment of animals and violations of food safety.  Sadly, Dr. Wyatt succumbed last month to brain cancer.

NICE: Bill Marler, food safety attorney and publisher of Food Safety News, for spending more time than even we thought he could dogging the U.S Senate for what apeared, at some points, to be lost cause for food safety.  He proved again the old political maxim that winners are the ones who show up.

NICE: Walmart, for not waiting for USDA to declare non-O157 toxin-producing strains of E. coli as adulterants and, on its own, requiring testing for those pathogens.