Spoiled: Why Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do about it

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.

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