Our Daily Poison
From Pesticides to Packaging, How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“An enlightening and deeply disturbing account” of the dangerous chemicals that have infiltrated our food, by the Rachel Carson Prize–winning journalist (Booklist).
Our Daily Poison is “a gripping and urgent book” for anyone concerned about democracy, corporate power, or public health (Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved). In it, award-winning journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin travels across North America, Europe, and Asia to document the shocking array of chemicals we encounter in our daily lives—from the pesticides that blanket our crops to the additives and plastics that contaminate our food—and their effects on our health over time.
Following the trail of the synthetic molecules in our environment and our food, Robin traces the ugly history of industrial chemical production, as well as the shoddy regulatory system for chemical products that still operates today. Using scientific studies, expert testimony, and interviews with farmworkers suffering from acute chronic poisoning, Robin demonstrates how corporate interests—and our own ignorance—may be costing us our lives.
“What Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring did for the environmental movement, Robin is doing for awareness of toxins in the food chain.” —Publishers Weekly
“This may be one of the most important books of the year.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Full of facts, stories, and wisdom.” —The Huffington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French journalist and documentary filmmaker Robin (The World According to Monsanto) delivers another fiercely activist account of how chemicals that are supposed to improve our lives are making us sick and how the regulation process "protects producers much more than it does consumers and citizens." Her unrelenting search for the truth behind the poisons in our foods takes her across the U.S. and Europe to talk with researchers examining the links between chemicals and disease, and those who are hiding those links. For example, she blasts the skewed 1981 study of cancer causes that puts individuals' behaviors at the top of the list, and hails the director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer who asserts it's estimated that "80 to 90 percent of cancer is linked to the environment and lifestyle." But Robin takes particular aim at how chemicals in our food and packaging are regulated, with one OSHA official telling her there's too much conflict of interest among scientists and corporations. What Rachel Carson's groundbreaking Silent Spring did for the environmental movement, Robin is doing for awareness of toxins in the food chain.
