Each morning, Eric Peoples sits up in bed and starts his day with a cough. A deep, long, hacking cough.
He plants his feet on the bedroom floor and immediately feels as if someone is standing on his chest. That's a good day. When it gets really bad, it seems as though a giant creature is crushing his lungs, squeezing the breath out of him.
Peoples has lived this way for several years. He got sick while mixing butter flavoring at a Missouri microwave popcorn plant, developing a ravaging lung disease that has tormented a small but alarming number of food workers nationwide.
Peoples sued. He won millions of dollars. Money isn't a worry now. His health is.
At 35, he has lost three-fourths of his lung capacity. He relies on oxygen when it's humid; one day, he may need a double lung transplant.
Peoples says no amount of money can make up for missing out on the chance to play ball with his son or teach his daughter to ride a bike. He isn't as angry as he once was, he says, and is thrilled that some microwave popcorn makers will stop using the chemical tied to his illness.
But even now, it's confounding to him that a pungent-smelling flavoring he poured in giant vats, a bright yellow pudding-like substance used to improve the taste of a common snack -- popcorn -- could change his life.
"When I first started getting sick, I was trying to figure out what it was," he says. "It never dawned on me that it was the butter flavoring. It's food. You eat it. I kept telling my family, surely it can't be. Why would something like that be harmful? How could it be bad?"
'Substance of suspicion'
In a world filled with hazards, some workers obviously face perilous conditions: miners burrowing hundreds of feet in the earth, farmers spraying pesticides, meatpackers wielding long knives to carve up huge carcasses moving quickly down a line.
By that yardstick, mixing an additive that's used to flavor popcorn, candy, baked goods and other foods -- it's also found naturally in small amounts in staples such as milk and butter -- almost seems innocuous.
But to many, it's not.
For several years, diacetyl, a chemical that gives foods a buttery taste, has been linked to a rare, irreversible lung disease. The result has been a public health debate that has stretched from Congress to courtrooms nationwide, leading to tens of millions of dollars in judgments.
