In Food We Trust: The Politics of Purity in American Food Regulation Courtney I. P. Thomas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

In Food We Trust: The Politics of Purity in American Food Regulation Courtney I. P. Thomas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.In recent decades, outbreaks of foodborne illness- linked to a variety of consumables from ground meat to peanut butter and fresh produce-have made national headlines. Each year, twenty-five percent of Americans suffer from a foodborne illness, with hundreds requiring hospitalization while a small, yet significant, number of cases result in death. Despite such large-scale compromises in the national food supply, Americans generally believe that food is safe and is well regulated by the government. This very idea that "the food we eat is safe and that the government has the ability and authority to make sure it is safe" is, according to scholar Courtney I. P. Thomas, one of the "great myths in US culture" (12). Thomas's In Food We Trust: The Politics of Purity in American Food Regulation examines this dis juncture between what Americans want to believe about their food and the realities of the national food regulatory system. For more than a hundred years, Thomas argues, government food regulation remained virtually unchanged, based on early-twentieth century understandings of purity and wholesomeness. Advances in scientific understanding of contamination and foodborne illness were pushed aside by food production companies wielding considerable influence over how food safety policies were written and executed, putting their economic self-interest before consumer safety. The food regulatory regime thus failed because it was "crippled by its century-old mandate.. .that makes transparency, answerability, compliance, enforcement, and sanctions virtually impossible" (5). The solution for the twenty-first century, Thomas argues, lies in a regulatory process "driven by the science" that "represents the interests of consumers" (4).In Food We Trust uses a series of case studies to trace the course of the American food safety system from its formative years in the progressive era through the revolutionary changes proposed by the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Thomas's analysis is rooted in the country's first national food safety legislation, passed in 1906: the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, which prohibited the adulteration or misbranding of food. Though these laws instituted important regulations, they morphed into a regulatory environment that would remain unchanged for nearly a century. Such laws focused on adulteration, Thomas argues, "cannot adequately address modern food safety concerns such as microbiological and chemical contamination" (33). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have since been limited to either consumer education (such as instructs on proper temperatures for cooking meat) or civil liability (suing companies for damages after consumers are harmed by tainted food). Though food regulators have attempted to correct these shortcomings, the results are often "voluntary guidelines rather than binding standards," a result of legal limitations that do not allow for greater inspection or mandatory recalls (136). …