Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment

Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions, and cultural notions of “pure” food.

Angela N. H. Creager is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, where she directed the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 2016–20. Her current work focuses on the role of genetic tests in environmental science and regulation during the late twentieth century.

Jean-Paul Gaudillière is a Senior Researcher at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, and a Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is currently working on the transition from “international public health” to “global health,” with a specific focus on developments in East Africa and South Asia.