Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment

Berghahn Books, 2021

Edited by: Angela Creager, the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science, and professor of history, and Jean-Paul Gaudillière, senior researcher at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, and professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Cover: Risk on the Table

Over the past 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 productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. Risk on the Table highlights historical cases that illuminate the history of food safety, exposing the powerful tensions among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions and cultural notions of “pure” food.