Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment(21 Environment in History: International Perspectives)

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.

Table 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