Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment ed. by Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment ed. by Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière Jonathan Rees (bio) Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment Edited by Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière. New York: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 366. The technology of food production both involves machines that make more food faster, as well as various processes which make that food more desirable to consumers. This is a book that focuses on the second of these categories. The editors deliberately invoke the industrialization of food in the introduction to the book, but the subsequent chapters deal more with chemistry than they do with technology in the mechanical sense. The authors are in dialogue with food and food adulteration literature more than with the broader issues related to industrialization. Nonetheless, since food, food technology, and food science all cross international boundaries, the risks associated with its industrialization and mass production eventually became global. For example, lowering the price or increasing the supply of something might bring the possibility of food poisoning or the long-term risk of cancer from ingesting some food additives. As Heiko Stoff explains in his chapter, a coloring agent like Butter Yellow (for margarine) fell out of favor after World War II in Germany because of the risk consumers faced when eating it. On the other hand, as the book's coeditor Angela Creager explains in her chapter, new food testing technology showed natural carcinogens in foods that Americans consumed every day. In another place at another time, these things might have been banned, but risk tolerance was very high in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s. Even once these risk perceptions hardened during the late 1980s, the American political system had become too industry friendly to effectively regulate these substances. The second half of the book focuses almost exclusively on the United States. In these chapters, you can see the high risk-tolerance of the U.S. regulatory regime for much of the last one hundred years. Hannah Landecker, for example, writes about the use of arsenic-based drugs in American industrial-scale meat production. These drugs moved growth-promoting hormones through cows, thereby increasing supply and lowering price. Despite some early opposition to these substances on health grounds, it took until 2015 for the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw approval of those drugs because of new discoveries regarding the arsenic that remained in the bodies of chickens. All drugs are poisonous to some degree, but even the U.S. government developed limits to how much it wanted eaters to consume. In their chapter, Maricel V. Maffini and Sarah Voge show the limitations of these regulations by focusing on the holes in the framework created by the 1958 Food Additives Amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics [End Page 899] Act of 1938. Although inspired by low levels of pesticide residues and other chemicals found in food and milk supplies, substances that are generally recognized as safe (GRAS) are still legal in the food supply under the law. While some substances that are potentially harmful simply haven't been tested, others have been grandfathered in despite known risks that they might cause harm. In short, the system set up to regulate food in the United States tolerates risks from various innovations because it favors whatever facilitates production on an industrial scale unless extraordinary proof of harm can be found, and even then action isn't guaranteed. Collectively, the chapters in this collection suggest that the tolerance for risk in the United States has generally been greater than elsewhere for both cultural and political reasons. The book's weak spot is the failure of some of the authors who focus on the United States to make at least a passing attempt at upholding the earlier section's global perspective. Luckily, 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. Jonathan Rees Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State...