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Michael Booth and Jennifer Brown decided to write a book about food safety and its annual impact on 50 million Americans after they spent months reporting on 33 deaths attributed to one simple thing: eating cantaloupe. Being the curious journalists they are, Booth and Brown figured very few tragedies are purely random events. And sure enough, the more they looked into the 2011 cantaloupe deaths involving Colorado fruit, the deeper the systemic problems they found in America's food network. Those dangerous problems exist to this day, and grow worse in some cases, as a flood of food imports escapes the overwhelmed notice of FDA inspectors underfunded by Congress and unable to finish writing their own mandated rules.
But neither Booth nor Brown has time to worry 24/7 about their own food, nor do they want Americans to drive themselves crazy with fear. Their book, "Eating Dangerously," is both investigative journalism and a practical guide to how families can shop, cook and clean up safely without spending every waking moment scrubbing with bleach. Yes, they got a little paranoid about microscopic "bugs" there for a little while -- writing about 8-foot piles of chicken manure bursting the seams of an egg factory will do that to you. But they focused that nervous energy on finding the latest food buying, preparation and cleanup tips from the top professionals in the U.S., and added practical assessments of GMO foods, cloned animals, irradiation to kill bacteria, and the battle of organic vs. processed foods.
And they set up the coming battles in food -- when will the poultry industry get deadly salmonella out of chicken, instead of blithely advising consumers to "cook it out"? When will farms stop overstuffing entire herds of animals with growth-promoting antibiotics that create superbug strains endangering human lives?
