cover image Our Daily Poison: From Pesticides to Packaging, How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick

Our Daily Poison: From Pesticides to Packaging, How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick

Marie-Monique Robin, trans. from the French by Allison Schein and Lara Vergnaud. New Press (Perseus, dist.), $28.95 (480p) ISBN 978-1-59558-909-5

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. [em](Dec.) [/em]