Food fight!

SAFE FOOD. Bacteria, biotechnology and bioterroism. By Marion Nestle. 350pp.
University of California Press. US $27.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
Pounds 19.95. - 0 520 23292 5
Food quality, purity and safety have been entangled with politics throughout history. Wine merchants of pre Hellenic Thasos were fined if they watered their produce; official inspectors monitored wine for colour and flavour in ancient Athens and Rome; in medieval England, bizarre penalties -including the pillory and tumbril -threatened brewers, bakers, vintners and butchers who marketed defective or adulterated products.
The Victorians established a regime of inspection and regulation such as we in the West now take for granted, but they had no inkling of the role of microbes in disease. Today we know that food-borne illnesses due to microbes are a worldwide problem. In developing countries, they are catastrophic -diarrhoeal diseases are up with malaria and TB in the WHO's global catalogue of killer diseases. In developed countries they are still only a nuisance to healthy people, because our immune systems, aided sometimes by medication, enable us to shrug off many of these afflictions. However, recent serious outbreaks of food poisoning by campylobacter, listeria, salmonella, E. coli O157 and other nasties, together with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant food pathogens, warn that our food web needs constant monitoring for pathogens at all stages from farm to table.

Posted in: Health