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 What We Don't Know About Our Food Supply Could Kill Us. By Gregory McNamee Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about A Food Chain Gone Haywire, By Nicols Fox (Basic Books). Cloth, $25. THE FATES SOMETIMES have a way of adding urgency to projects long in the works. In the case of Nicols Fox's Spoiled, a disquieting and utterly convincing exposé of the American way of producing and eating food, those fates lent a hand in recent months by inserting a couple of million pounds of tainted hamburger meat into the country's mass-market, fast-food system. Thankfully, the meat was recalled and destroyed before it could work its way into the gullets of citizens everywhere--just in time, and perhaps just this time.
According to recent Centers for Disease Control figures, more than 81 million cases of food poisoning occur in this country each year. E. coli 0157:H7, a particularly nasty bacterium, alone causes as many as 20,000 illnesses each year, killing between 250 and 500 Americans. Because of E. coli and other bacteria, it's no longer safe to eat the skins of uncooked vegetables, no longer safe to eat eggs, no longer safe to eat hamburger--a supermarket package of which can contain meat from many animals, killed at different times and in different places.
But only, she adds, if they "read obscure medical journals," the chief source of information about such unpleasant truths. Certainly, she reiterates, you won't find the news in most newspapers.
Fox's book will make you think twice about the foods you buy
and consume, and it adds up to a fine work of public-interest
journalism that could not be more timely.
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That was big news, at least for a day or two. And the daily news
is already full of stories about mad cow disease, outbreaks of
fast-food poisonings, and biogenetic food experimentation gone
wrong--but, in Fox's view, not full enough. Even with the horror
stories, she contends, the mass media seriously under report the
threat that current methods of food manufacture and distribution
pose to the public health.
It's something of an irony, Fox slyly remarks, that with our
abundance of food choices--the average supermarket today stocks
25,000-odd items, against the 300 a store held in 1950--we should
have to worry so much about what we eat. But we do, and the causes
are many. With advances in transportation, refrigeration, chemical
engineering, and industrial agriculture, our foods come farther
and farther from their sources, and at all seasons, an unnatural
state of affairs never before seen in human history. In the meanwhile,
bacteria are getting smarter, evolving to survive our efforts
to contain them. Salmonella, Fox writes, now can survive in eggs
boiled for as long as eight minutes, "bad news indeed for
egg lovers, for home cooks everywhere, and certainly for chefs."
