Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the worlds population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supplys productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers decisions, and cultural notions of pure food.
Recenzijos
The book stands out for its multidisciplinary approach, integrating history, science, and policy analysis to explore the historical context and ongoing debates and challenges in food safety, including conflicting interests shaping policies and practices. The volume is particularly relevant in an era where food safety and environmental health are increasingly intertwined with global trade and industrial practices. Agriculture and Human Values
The editors have brought together enough international work to form a broad picture of changes in the global food system. This is an extremely welcome view of how those changes were received in different places at different times. Technology and Culture
This collection draws insightful genealogies of a persistently virulent problem: food safety. The book brings together a series of well-written and exciting historical cases that together create a picture of the scientific and political struggles for food safety and their obstacles. Alexander von Schwerin, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Risk on the Table is a perfectly apt title for a book which deals with a major concern of modern societies: What shall we eat? Combining perspectives of food risk as a matter of health concerns; environmental issues; and economic, social and employment problems, this book is truly innovative. Karin Zachmann, The Technical University of Munich
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Angela N. H. Creager & Jean-Paul Gaudilličre
Part I: Objectifying Dangers
Chapter
1. Salad Days: The Science and Medicine of Bad Greens, 18702000
Anne Hardy
Chapter
2. Radioactive Diet: Food, Metabolism, and the Environment, c. 1960
Soraya de Chadarevian
Chapter
3. Poison and Cancer: The Politics of Food Carcinogens in 1950s West
Germany
Heiko Stoff
Chapter
4. EAT. DIE. The Domestication of Carcinogens in the 1980s
Angela N. H. Creager
Chapter
5. Risk on the Negotiating Table: Malnutrition, Mold Toxicity, and
Postcolonial Development
Lucas M. Mueller
Chapter
6. Contaminated Foods, Global Environmental Health, and the
Political Recalcitrance of a Pollution Problem: The Case of PCBs from 1966 to
the Present Day
Aurélien Féron
Part II: Ordering Risks
Chapter
7. Trace Amounts at Industrial Scale: Arsenicals and Medicated Feed
in the Production of the Western Diet
Hannah Landecker
Chapter
8. Between Bacteriology and Toxicology: Agricultural Antibiotics and
US Risk Regulation (194877)
Claas Kirchhelle
Chapter
9. Conflicts of Interest, Ignorance, and Hegemony in the
Diethylstilboestral US Food Crisis
Jean-Paul Gaudilličre
Chapter
10. Defining Food Additives: Origins and Shortfalls of the US
Regulatory Framework
Maricel V. Maffini and Sarah Vogel
Chapter
11. The Rise (and Fall) of the Food-Drug Line: Classification,
Gatekeepers, and Spatial Mediation in Regulating US Food and Health Markets
Xaq Frohlich
Afterword
Deborah Fitzgerald
Index
Angela N. H. Creager is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, where she directed the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 201620. Her current work focuses on the role of genetic tests in environmental science and regulation during the late twentieth century.
