Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Haywire - Softcover

Fox, Nicols

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014027555X ISBN 13: 9780140275551

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1998

Synopsis

A distinguished journalist reveals the truth about foodborne illness, explaining how the importing and exporting, processing, packaging, and distribution of food have led to an exposure to a wide variety of dangerous microbes and pathogens. Reprint.

About this title

Review

Despite frequent media accounts of such unpleasant matters as mad cow disease and outbreaks of food poisoning at fast-food restaurants, Nicols Fox argues, we know too little about the threat that current methods of food manufacture and distribution pose to health. Citing Center for Disease Control figures that put the food poisoning count alone at more than 81 million cases a year in the United States, she notes that in many countries it is unsafe to eat the skins of uncooked vegetables, eggs, ground meat, and other staples. Part of the problem lies in advances in transportation and storage technology, which allow us to consume foods grown very far away and at all seasons; part lies in the fact that bacteria are evolving to survive efforts to contain them. Fox's book is alarming--but appropriately so.

From Booklist

Journalist Fox investigated the fast-food hamburgers tainted with E. coli bacteria that were making people sick--and killing children--on the West Coast in 1993. Her study of food-borne disease here is concerned with our nation's food, especially the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors outbreaks of disease and food contaminants. She uncovers such pathogens as Salmonella in unpasteurized orange juice at Disney World, Cryptosporidium in freshly pressed cider from apples that were not thoroughly washed, and Listeria, which obstinately thrives in chilled oxygen-poor conditions, e.g., packages of precut salad greens. She devotes a chapter to British cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or as it is popularly dubbed, mad cow disease, and she discusses the microbial threats of food imports and the workers who take foodstuffs from the ground or feedlot to the marketplace. "If we are interested in the safety of our food," she writes, "then we have to be interested in the living conditions of the people who handle it." A well-documented tocsin for food toxins. Jennifer Henderson

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 014027555X
• ISBN 13: 9780140275551
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448