Eat, Drink, & Be Wary:  How Unsafe Is Our Food?, by Charles M. Duncan

This book both demonstrates a severe problem with the safety of food in the United States and demonstrates how it is that people who earnestly wish to solve it nevertheless can often alienate potential allies in the effort to solve such problems politically.  There is a lot in this book that strikes me with a high degree of outrage, but at the same time I don’t think the author goes about directing this outrage or at least in motivating it in such a way as to build a coalition to address the issues that he (rightly) finds to be deeply upsetting.  It is one thing to believe that our government assigns various breeds of foxes to guard the henhouse, that not nearly enough money is devoted to inspection and that industries and food importers are not trustworthy enough at present to regulate themselves.  It is entirely another to engage in argumentation ad populum and blindly praise the regulatory climate of the European Union, which is not a model that everyone (myself included) would find to be all that worth following.  This book is aimed not only at those who find the contemporary food climate unacceptable, but those who want us to ape European legal norms, and that’s not something I can support.

This short book of about 150 pages or so is divided into 19 short chapters and other material.  The book begins with a foreword, acknowledgements, and introduction that point to the book’s genesis in the author’s investigative reporting as a local television muckrucker.  The author begins with discussions of our vulnerability to bioterrorism (1) and the total lack of safety of food imports (2).  After that the author spends several chapters discussing specific problems related to American domestic and imported produce (3), poultry (4), eggs (5), beef and pork (6), milk (7), and seafood (8).  After that the author discusses deli dangers (9), some rather unpleasant stories about outbreaks, illnesses, and deaths (10), and the problems of food tampering and food fraud (11).  The author discusses the reality of the fact that many other countries won’t eat the foods we allow in (12), that there are often plenty of unwelcome critters in our foods (13), and that GMO’s (14) and untrustworthy practices “generally recommended as safe” (15) threaten our food supply as well.  After that the author talks about Bisphenol A (16), the lack of regulation of many cottage food sources (17), restaurant food (18), and the government’s poor report card (19).  Finally, the author closes with a discussion of sugar as a major recreational drug, an appendix that seeks to provide resources for food complaints, and notes, a bibliography, index, and notes about the author.

If one wanted to compare this work to the body of literature that exists, it would fit in nicely with the early 20th century works whose lurid tales of unsafe and quite frankly disgusting food service practices led to the establishment of the American regulatory law and bureaucracy that now exists.  Yet this book is unsatisfying, not least because it manages to simultaneously incite indignation on the part of readers about our vulnerability to unsafe and corrupt practices of storing and preparing and labeling food while not in any way demonstrating an adequate sense of realism about what can be done about it.  If government cannot be trusted to pass adequate laws about regulation, fund adequate inspection regimes, and even staff itself with the proper sort of people who lack corrupt ties to the industries they are supposed to regulate, then what are the people supposed to do about it?  What would it take to pressure companies to be trustworthy in the absence of reliance upon the coercive power of government?  Are companies interested in serving the best interests of their customers in the face of easy profits for behaving in a corrupt and unacceptable fashion?  The author raises these questions but sadly does not provide sufficient answers for them.