Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Haywire Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a brilliant investigation into the present state of our food supply. Many of us have read scattered news items about food poisoning outbreaks here and there, but have never really noticed what's been happening to our food supply. In this book, Fox brings together hundreds of stories of outbreaks, and through them, brings the elusive big picture into focus. Fox takes us behind the burger counters back to the factory farm, where chickens are sick, and cows are fattened up on the dung and bedding from the sick chickens. The manure from the chicken-dung eating cows is spread on apple orchards, and all of the sudden organic apple cider must be pasteurized to kill the e. coli. Before reading this book, I wondered why eating raw cookie dough never made me sick as a child, but now we're cautioned never even to consider such dangerous habits. As Fox explains, eating raw eggs wasn't dangerous before, but thanks to modern agribusiness practices, chickens have salmonella in their ovaries, so all eggs must be assumed to be tainted As a result, the only safe egg these days is one whose yolk is cooked solid- -eating eggs sunny-side up is akin to Russian roulette.
Fox's main message is that it is vitally important to know who grew your food and how, as well as who cooked your food. If you choose to eat meat, you should know where the meat came from. In the interests of making a profit, factory farms feed meat and milk animals waste products including diseased animal parts and dung. Even if the animals are able to digest such a diet, bacteria and other pathogens from such a diet eventually end up on our plates. Hamburger meat is exceptionally risky since a single pound can include meat from hundreds of individual cows, and if any one of those hundreds carries a pathogen, the entire lot of meat will be tainted. The only way to be reasonably sure of getting healthy meat is to purchase it from a farmer that you know, someone whose farm you can visit in person. Meanwhile, food handlers and preparers seem to be less and less familiar with basic rules of food safety. Fox mentions supermarket workers who don't know the dangers of dented or bulging cans, and teenagers earning minimum wage frying meat at burger joints who have never cooked anything before in their lives. She stresses how important it is not to assume that food is safe just because it is on sale. Sure, the USDA, FDA, and threat of lawsuits give the consumer some protection, but a lawsuit is of little use in bringing a child back to life after a little case of food poisoning.
Living in Dubai, my husband and I experience at least one incidence of food poisoning per month, despite being cautious about where and what we eat. We have learned to inspect every package carefully in the supermarket, considering the country of origin, the condition of the container, and the manner in which the goods are stored. In restaurants, we choose our food not by what looks tastiest, but instead by what is least likely to be tainted. We've seen supermarket food handlers at the deli counter blithely lift dripping raw chickens over cooked ones and we've become vegetarians out of necessity. In this book, Fox argues that it's up to American consumers to see that their food supply doesn't continue to go the same way.

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