<p>
	<em>“The book stands out for its multidisciplinary approach, integrating history, science, and policy analysis to explore the historical context and ongoing debates and challenges in food safety, including conflicting interests shaping policies and practices. The volume is particularly relevant in an era where food safety and environmental health are increasingly intertwined with global trade and industrial practices.”</em> <strong>• Agriculture and Human Values</strong></p>
<p>
	<em>“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.”</em> <strong>• Technology and Culture</strong></p>
<p>
	<em>“This collection draws insightful genealogies of a persistently virulent problem: food safety. The book brings together a series of well-written and exciting historical cases that together create a picture of the scientific and political struggles for food safety and their obstacles.”</em> <strong>• Alexander von Schwerin</strong>, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science</p>
<p>
	<em>“‘</em>Risk on the Table<em>’ is a perfectly apt title for a book which deals with a major concern of modern societies: What shall we eat? Combining perspectives of ‘food risk’ as a matter of health concerns; environmental issues; and economic, social and employment problems, this book is truly innovative.”</em> <strong>• Karin Zachmann</strong>, The Technical University of Munich</p>
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.
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 tension that exists between 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
Jean-Paul Gaudillière is a Senior Researcher at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, and a Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is currently working on the transition from “international public health” to “global health,” with a specific focus on developments in East Africa and South Asia.
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Angela N. H. Creager is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, where she directed the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 2016–20. Her current work focuses on the role of genetic tests in environmental science and regulation during the late twentieth century.