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Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world's population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply's 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.
List of contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction Angela N. H. Creager & Jean-Paul Gaudillière Part I: Objectifying Dangers
Chapter 1. Salad Days: The Science and Medicine of Bad Greens, 1870-2000
¿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 (1948-77)¿
Claas Kirchhelle Chapter 9. Conflicts of Interest, Ignorance, and Hegemony in the Diethylstilboestral US Food Crisis¿
Jean-Paul Gaudillière 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
About the author
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 2016–20. Her current work focuses on the role of genetic tests in environmental science and regulation during the late twentieth century.
Jean-Paul Gaudillière is a Senior Researcher at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, and a Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is currently working on the transition from “international public health” to “global health,” with a specific focus on developments in East Africa and South Asia.
Summary
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.
