Customer Reviews

Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (California Studies in Food and Culture)

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"Safe Food" is a terrific look at the issues involved in keeping our food supply uncontaminated. It is also a look behind the scenes at how our democracy really works, and it's not a pretty sight. Corporations choosing profits over public health, government representatives more often than not siding with industry rather than consumers, corruption, greed, and ineptitude are all part of this fascinating story. Highly recommended!

This is a well-written book by an author with experience in both the scientific and public affairs aspects of food quality and safety. Marion Nestle makes an effort to describe the complex scientific procedures associated with foodborne disease investigation, and the creation of bioengineered foodstuffs, reasonably clear to the layman / woman. Her message is simple and direct: as far as US government regulatory agencies, and the food industry itself, are concerned, food safety and wholesomeness is regarded as a secondary consideration to corporate profit. Her thesis is supported by a wide and varied list of references, including the scientific literature, print media, and quotes from participants involved in the struggle to make food safety one of the more urgent issues in contemporary public health. "Safe Food" covers such important topics as the outbreaks of E. coli caused by feces-contaminated ground beef; the ineptly regulated release of genetically engineered crops into farm systems and the spread of transgenes into native species; and the farcical (but ultimately tragic) mishandling of the "mad cow" epidemic by a British government blindly devoted to promotion of the beef industry. In each instance, Nestle documents how the food and agrochemical industries conspired to weaken federal oversight of food safety and quality by manipulating politicians and government officials, all in order to maximize profits.

The book is not perfect; some of the sections describing various scientific procedures may have benefited from the inclusion of explanatory diagrams, rather than somewhat belabored text descriptions. But overall, "Safe Food" is an important and timely book, and one well worth reading by anyone concerned about the quality of the food we eat.

As a food safety trainer I did not realise the rest of what has and is going on to deliberatly sell us food that is not fit for the purpose all in the interest in profit.

One could have doubted what was written but we have just had the blatent disregard for food safety by 'CADBURY' the famous chocolate people claiming that only minute traces of bacteria may be present.

You either have bacteria or no bacteria there is no halfway house, this book will open everyone's eyes.

This review is of the updated (2010) edition of Professor Nestle's book first published in 2003.

While the main body of the text is full of examples that now seem far away in time, this book remains worth reading for those seeking an understanding of the cross currents still alive in the national policy debates over safe food. (For those following current events, there is pending legislation in the U.S. Senate that would reform federal food safety policy.)

I do think the author is correct in her assertion that food safety is as much about politics as science. Social norms, commercial realities, and other factors often do trump pure science.

This is decidedly a book written by an advocate: one who sees corporations as bad actors (unless the firm is Ben and Jerry's) and one who is sold on both a King's Cure--human pathogen testing and HACCP--and, above all, one single federal food agency.

Professor Nestle believes that with more government inspectors working for one powerful food agency, all auditing and enforcing private farms' and processors' paper-work systems, which in turn would be based on the best available science (unless some other social good trumps), we would have a country with fewer people sick from what they eat.

Meanwhile, I think most people in American agriculture do have good motives and find it amazing that this country feeds 300 hundred-plus million every day with so relatively few food safety incidents.