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.

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 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