Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About A Food Chain Gone Haywire

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Basic Books, Jun 26, 1997 - History - 448 pages
Journalist Nicols Fox has spent the past several years researching a story that won't go away. Pulling together the pieces of a complex chain of events for the reader, she tells in arresting detail what has happened to food and why. Drawing from scientific and medical journals and more than 100 interviews with epidemiologists, physicians, food scientists, USDA and FDA officials, farmers, distributors, and consumer victims, her findings are fascinating, provocative, and terrifying. The dangerous truth is that in the last twenty-five years we have lost control of our food supply. In the past, the connection between the cow in the pasture and the burger on the bun was simple and direct. Now it is a tangled and messy chain of factory farming and processing, high-tech packaging, mass distribution, and importing and exporting - each, in its way, creating a niche for an opportunistic pathogen and an emerging foodborne disease.

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Contents

IThe Index Case
3
2 Policing the Pathogens
26
3 The Changing Nature of Foodborne Disease
48
Copyright

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About the author (1997)

Journalist Nicols Fox is the author of Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Haywire (paperback title Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do about It). Spoiled focuses on food-borne diseases, such as E. coli and Salmonella, that kill almost 9,000 Americans each year. Fox first became interested in the subject in 1993, when she read about a group of children on the west coast who had become seriously ill and, in several cases, had died, after eating hamburgers contaminated with E. coli bacteria at a local fast-food restaurant. She began researching the subject, and reached the frightening conclusion that the E. coli incident she'd read about was not an isolated incident; food, particularly meat, becomes contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens very easily because of the way the Americans mass-produce, process, and distribute food. As a result of several years of research, Fox wrote Spoiled and became a "reluctant" vegetarian. Fox has written articles for many journals, including The Economist and the Washington Journalism Review, where she worked as an editor for many years. She lives in rural Maine.

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