Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [3]
New York
February 2010
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
FOOD SAFETY IS A MATTER OF HUGE PUBLIC INTEREST. HARDLY a day goes by without a front-page account of some new and increasingly alarming hazard in our food supply. As an academic nutritionist with a long-standing interest in how food affects health, I cannot help but deal with issues of food safety, daily. Students, colleagues, and friends often ask me whether it is safe to eat one or another food or ingredient. My department at New York University offers degree programs in the new field of food studies as well as in nutrition, and many instructors and colleagues associated with these programs work in restaurants or specialty food businesses. They also ask safety questions, as their livelihoods depend on serving safe food.
Nevertheless, I did not set out to write a book about food safety. My academic training is in science (molecular biology, but long lapsed) as well as in public health nutrition, and for many years my research has focused on the ways in which science and politics interact to influence government policies that affect nutrition and health. In that context, I have been speaking and writing about food biotechnology since the early 1990s. I immediately saw that genetically engineered foods raise questions about politics as much as about safety. Indeed, the safety questions seemed overshadowed by issues related to the implications of such foods for society and democratic values.
I originally intended to include several chapters on such issues in a book about the ways in which food companies use the political system to achieve commercial goals. That book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, came out in 2002 from the University of California Press. In the course of events, however, it became clear that the subject of food safety deserved a book in its own right. To begin with, during the years I worked on Food Politics (1999 to 2001), food safety crises popped up one after another, especially in Europe. Mysteriously contaminated soft drinks, cows sick with mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease, and outbreaks of what my friend and colleague Claude Fischler calls “Listeria bacteria hysteria” were eliciting headlines and destroying economies as well as confidence in the food supply. On the domestic front, one food after another—hamburger and such unlikely suspects as raspberries, apple juice, and bean sprouts—appeared as sources of bacterial infections. Because some of the contaminating bacteria resisted antibiotics, the illnesses were difficult to treat. Product recalls because of microbial contamination also seemed to be growing both in size and public attention.
Furthermore, I was receiving increasingly urgent queries from purveyors of small-scale, artisanal cheeses who wanted to know: can cheeses in general, and raw milk cheeses in particular, transmit bacterial diseases, mad cow disease, or foot-and-mouth disease? The answers to such questions were not easy to find, and I was soon engaged in reading veterinary reports and badgering experts and federal officials for information. Eventually, I could provide a scientific answer: cheese has a low probability of transmitting these or any other diseases, but the possibility cannot be excluded. This answer is either satisfactory or not depending on whether one is an optimist or a pessimist, and it raises its own set of questions. Does a low probability of harm mean that a risk is negligible and can be ignored? Or is it unreasonable to take the chance? Would pasteurization (heating