Customer Reviews

Is Our Food Safe: A Consumer's Guide to Protecting Your Health and the Environment

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"Is Our Food Safe?" provides an easy to follow, step-by-step guide to avoiding dangerous foods and reducing individual and widespread environmental impacts. The authors outline clear environmental and food safety issues. Particularly useful is the extensive appendix which offers valuable resources for further information. This book covers the topics of food safety and the environmental impacts of food thoroughly and interestingly. Nothing is left to question. Strongly recommended!

Overall, this is a decent "beginner's" guide. However, I found the authors' stance on bioengineered foods to be a little disturbing. Though they attempted to present a balanced view I definitely got the sense that they were in favor of genetically engineered foods. This stance is troubling, given the unknown and potentially disastrous consequences of bioengineered foods. Think of the mammoth butterflies killed by genetically altered corn, rats who developed tumors from genetically altered potatoes.

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins (foreword by Dean Ornish) presents a more thorough chapter on the hazards of genetically engineered foods. Actually, Robbins's eye-opening book takes a more in-depth look at the impact of your food choices on your health and the environment, and covers other topics of related interest such as deceptive advertising by the food industry. And in doing so, he also presents a persuasive case for vegetarianism--his book is fascinating, well-researched, & well-written.

If you are truly serious about your food choices, get Is Our Food Safe, and then read The Food Revolution by John Robbins.

The authors seem to be pro biotech industry. I found it disturbing that they could so confidently write that Genetically Modiefied foods are safe to eat. Even when they present evidence from scientific studies that say otherwise, they still come right back and say the we should not be alarmed in eating these foods. The authors have an over-simplistic sheep-mentality viewpoint. There were some erroneous information presented in their GM foods historical timeline.

Obviously, if anyone is insane enough to be paying attention, this is one in a series of books on the topic of diet (as in eating habits), health, and environmental sustainability that I'm reading though to get a better sense of what is really the best way to "manage one's health" these days...and while I enjoyed reading this book, it was not an enjoyable book. Is Our Food Safe? Is not written to entertain or to include an entertaining aspect. It's all pretty much fact, after fact, after fact. It's a bit dry, but packed with info. The premise here is that they authors are trying to present a balanced and unbiased look at a variety of issues from eating meat, to bioengineered foods, to pesticide use, and so on. While I do feel that they TRIED to present these topics in a balanced way, I don't think they really succeeded and that is particularly clear in the area of meat eating and bioengineered foods. I think what Is Our Food Safe does is provide a solid foundation for someone just starting to investigate food choices, food safety, and sustainable/organic food choices, but it's ONLY a starting place...you'd want to read more to get a truly balanced overview and to narrow down how YOU feel on a given issue and how feasible any eating/living choices you can make given your budge and time. I'd rate this about a B-.