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Eat, Drink, and Be Wary
How Unsafe Is Our Food?
by Charles M. Duncan
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Pub Date Jan 06 2015 | Archive Date Jan 16 2015
Description
Charles Duncan has been writing non-fiction for the last forty years. He has researched and written documentaries, articles, investigative series, and features exploring a vast array of compelling topics: crime, hazardous chemical dumps, religious cults, discrimination, safety and security violations, and others. Eat, Drink and Be Wary was also the title of Duncan’s most popular television news series, 100 segments on the six o’clock and ten o’clock newscasts, graphically depicting the sorry state of restaurant food safety in Dallas and Fort Worth. His articles have been carried on ABC’s World News Tonight and Good Morning America, scores of radio and TV network affiliate stations, and have been written about in TIME, Newsweek, Texas Monthly, the London Sunday Times, D Magazine, and the Dallas Morning News. His exclusive report on the Palmer Drug Abuse Program prompted follow-up stories by CBS 60 Minutes and ABC’s 20/20 program. He has won a duPont Columbia Silver Baton, an Edward R. Murrow award, Headliners and numerous other national and regional awards. After spending seven years as the investigative reporter for KAKE-TV in Wichita, Kansas, Charles became a Senior Investigative Reporter at WFAA-TV. He later obtained his Texas Private Investigator’s License and operated his own company for many years.
How, in a country so advanced in most areas, could we have descended to this alarming state of food safety? One answer: Budget cuts and bureaucrats. Eat, Drink, and Be Wary examines the multitude of dangers in food production, transportation, storing, and preparation that result in this shocking number of preventable illnesses and deaths. It takes a broad and detailed look, in all food groups, at the problems and potential solutions in food safety practices, inspections, and enforcements.
This book answers the questions and concerns of millions of Americans who have reached new levels of serious doubts about the safety of our food. Charles Duncan points readers to the dangers to look for in deli foods, raw milk, seafood, poultry, eggs, beef, and others. For consumers who care about the food they eat, this book details the dangers, offers direction for choosing safe foods, and provides a critique of our current system that suggests ways it can be fixed, or at least improved.
A Note From the Publisher
You are reviewing uncorrected page proofs. Quote only from finished book. Contact publicity@rowman.com with questions. Thank you!
Advance Praise
Charles
Duncan is the Upton Sinclair of his day, delivering a searing,
groundbreaking investigative look into the U.S. food industry that is as
important as it is disturbing. Eat, Drink & Be Wary
is must reading for consumers and those government inspectors tasked
with keeping our food safe. Duncan reveals stunning shortfalls in the
quality and inspection of domestically grown and imported foods and
herbs that are jaw dropping. This is investigative reporting at its
best.
— Peter Van Sant, Correspondent, CBS News
Charles
Duncan has written a lively account of the many chinks in the armor
meant to protect the safety of our foods and beverages. Globalization,
concentration, industrialization, misuse of antibiotics in food animal
production, political power of big agriculture, underfunding and
ineffectiveness of regulatory agencies – it’s all here in this
informative book by a seasoned journalist.
— Robert S. Lawrence, MD, Director, Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Eat, Drink, & Be Wary
exposes the ill-gotten gains of the food industry in exhaustive,
sometimes stomach-churning detail. The results may shock or surprise
you.
— Ed Bark, former longstanding TV critic of The Dallas Morning News and proprietor of the unclebarky.com TV website since 2006
Eat, Drink, & Be Wary
comes as a rude awakening to the fact that our government is asleep at
the wheel in safeguarding our foods. In this book, Charles Duncan has
reminded us about the horrifying truth of the deteriorating quality of
foods we consume daily. He also informs us, the consumers, as to what we
can do to reverse this destructive trend.
— Chensheng Alex Lu, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology, Harvard School of Public Health
In Eat, Drink, & Be Wary,
Duncan offers us a gruesome panorama of the global food industry, its
frailties and its dangers. If we considered food to be a more critical
factor in health, we might inspect and care for this system differently.
But as Duncan shows, food is but a commodity, inspected and monitored
by a lackadaisical political system, created and sold at minimal cost to
consumers who are anonymous and replaceable. This book is a quick
overview, product by product, crisis by crisis, of the current dangers
in our industrial foods.
— Carolyn Smith-Morris, Ph.D., M.S., LPC, Associate Professor, Southern Methodist University
A
great repository of facts for anyone who is concerned about food
safety. It is a much needed outcry for transparency in our food
production.
— Mark Post, MD, PhD, professor and chair of Physiology, Maastricht University
Foodborne
illnesses and the quality of food production and preparation are major
issues in the US. This is a must read for every parent and for anyone
interested in their general health. The more knowledgeable we are, the
more transparent and accountable the industry must become. The quality
of our food should always be held to the highest standards and not
allowed to continue to be a form of culinary Russian roulette.
— Bill Macatee, announcer for The NFL on CBS, US Open Tennis, Golf
In
his carefully researched book, Charles M. Duncan comprehensively
addresses hazards as they come with our daily food. Based on solid
facts, figures, and references, he fascinatingly discusses nutritional
safety and security across the board: from bioterrorism over food
imports and genetically modified organisms to outbreaks of food-borne
illnesses, and others. The book also includes honed criticism of the
dispersion of responsibility an the U.S. system of government, as well
as practical tips how to mitigate food-related risks in our everyday
lives. This work is an excellent contribution to fostering homeland and
civil security debates in an all-hazards context, as well as to
increasing societal awareness and preparedness.
— Alexander
Siedschlag, Ph.D, Professor and Chair of Homeland Security and Public
Health Preparedness, The Pennsylvania State University, Penn State
Harrisburg
For Americans, eating
healthy may only be a challenge at the start of our daily routine.
Finding a variety of safe, healthy, and available foods impacts the
health of us all. As some of our everyday interactions have been marked
with more invasiveness, Duncan brings questions food safety, trends in
risk management with nutrition and concerns with the oversight needed to
prevent food threats from natural hazards to terrorism. Information on
eating safely may be a new top of the food pyramid.
— J. Eric Dietz, PhD, PE, Director, Purdue Homeland Security Institute and Professor, Computer and Information Technology
Charles
Duncan has provided a sobering, and potentially stomach-churning, look
at the gaps in our food safety system. Controls on food imports are
negligible, domestic controls are too lax, and food producers are taking
short-cuts and risks that should alarm every consumer.
— Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO, The Humane Society of the United States
A
must read for policy makers and elected officials – while they are
eating! Duncan documents one of the most important crises in America –
the safety of our food.
— David
A. Sterling, Ph.D., CIH, Professor and Chair Department of
Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, Director Doctoral PhD
Program, School of Public Health, University of North Texas Health
Science Center
A lot of the information Charles Duncan includes in Eat, Drink, & Be Wary,
is scary as hell! However, by reading this book, we will all be better
informed about the choices we made and the foods we eat. Thank you
Charles and “BON APPETIT” ya’ll!
— Ruta Lee, Canadian actress, Hollywood, CA
Charles
M. Duncan has assembled a significant amount of data on the problems
with allowing uninspected and untested food products to enter the
marketplace. Duncan outlines the major failures of the Government
agencies in allowing healthy food to reach the tabletop.
— John Ubelaker, Ph.D., Southern Methodist University
Eat, Drink, & Be Wary is
a detailed examination of the failure of government oversight agencies
to protect consumers from food companies that place profit above
everything else. This failure of the agencies that are supposed to
oversee the food industries leads to horrible cruelty to farm animals
and a polluted food supply. You will cry and, if you have a dark sense
of humor, you will laugh. My hope is that you will also be spurred to
action.
— Bruce Friedrich, director, Farm Sanctuary
Available Editions
EDITION | Hardcover |
ISBN | 9781442238398 |
PRICE | $32.00 (USD) |
Links
Featured Reviews
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This book is really scary, everything we eat, whether you cook it or not, grow it or not, can be the carrier of a number of viruses or pathogenic bacteria more or less serious, some others are directly lethal. Fortunately, here in Europe, legislation is much better and more attentive compared to the one in the United States, but the diseases know no borders.
Questo libro mette veramente paura, ogni cosa che mangiamo, sia che la cuciniamo o meno, puó essere vettore di una serie di virus o batteri patogeni piú o meno gravi, senza contare quelli direttamente letali. Fortunatamente qui in Europa la legislazione é decisamente migliore e piú attenta di quella degli Stati Uniti, ma le malattie non conoscono frontiere.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND ROWMAN AND LITTLEFIELD FOR THE PREVIEW!
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Look before you eat
Eat, Drink, and Be Wary: How Unsafe Is Our Food? by Charles M. Duncan (Rowman & Littlefield, $32).
We’ve been repeatedly subjected to concerns about our food supply system—go all the way back to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry—but there is, unfortunately, always room for more food safety journalism. Reporter Charles M. Duncan has been covering food safety issues for television for a number of years, and in Eat, Drink, and Be Wary he compiles and updates his work on the various ways in which the American food system fails to protect consumers from health risks.
Whether it’s poor food handling practices in restaurants, inadequate screening for diseased livestock in slaughterhouses, or general unsanitary conditions in processing plants, Duncan deserves his reputation as the Sinclair of contemporary times. This book is extremely unsettling, given how much of the food industry relies on consumer trust. The good news is that Eat, Drink, and Be Wary also offers some tips on what to look for in order to protect ourselves from foodborne illness.
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