HEALTH: Trust lies at the basis of any society's smooth functioning. For any social contract to hold, we have to be confident that almost all of the people will fulfil their obligations almost all of the time.
This requirement pervades every aspect of social life, but there are perhaps few where it is so straightforwardly crucial as in relation to food safety.
The basic premise of Marion Nestle's engrossing new book is that the trust we routinely place in the food industry and in food safety agencies is frequently misplaced. It is a timely publication, and it usefully nudges the debate about food standards forward by shifting the focus away from our unhealthy eating habits and towards the serious health risks that can be introduced to the food supply through corporate negligence and self-interest.
Nestle addresses two broad issues relating to food safety: bacterial contamination and genetic modification (GM).
The first of these is handled extremely convincingly. The author paints a disturbing picture of bacterial threats evolving and multiplying while regulatory structures advance only glacially, impeded by the huge political weight of the food industry.
There is little shock or surprise at her detailed accounts, rich in anecdote, of corporate misdeeds and political spinelessness; it is a wearily familiar story.
More revelatory is the insight Nestle offers into the biological consequences of corporate and political developments in the food industry.
The science here is both persuasive and easily digestible as she describes how changes in production methods and in the concentration of ownership have allowed and encouraged foodborne pathogens first to mutate into variants we are ill-prepared to deal with, and then to spread with unprecedented speed.
The food safety system has been far slower to evolve than has its microbial adversaries. Nestle recounts how the US food industry campaigned relentlessly, and for a long time successfully, against the introduction of pathogen-testing. Their preferred regulatory route had been to induce politicians to retain the old system of "poke-and-sniff" carcass inspections, a hopelessly anachronistic methodology designed in the early 1900s to prevent tubercular animals entering the food system. It would be funny if it weren't so serious.
Unfortunately, the rigour of Nestle's analysis wanes as she moves into the second half of the book and takes up the issue of food biotechnology.
Her position in relation to the safety of GM foods is in line with what appears from her account to be a very broad scientific consensus, namely that GM foods pose only the remotest of possible risks to our safety.
However, given that the trumpeted benefits to the public of these foods have yet to materialise, she proceeds to conclude that any risk, however remote, should be sufficient to warrant a cautious regulatory regime.
This is a perfectly reasonable position, and one I would like to have seen fleshed out at greater length.
Instead, Nestle goes to considerable lengths in her GM chapters to outline and commend the use of food safety concerns by anti-biotechnology lobby groups as a Trojan Horse to raise broader socio-economic issues. This strikes me as an irresponsible line for her to take.
Throughout the book, one of Nestle's repeated arguments is for the transparent availability of accurate information so as to allow the public to make informed decisions about the safety risks posed by different foods. Yet in relation to GM, she defends the exaggeration of remote risks as a means of advancing a broader political agenda concerning democratic decision-making and global inequality.
However laudable this agenda may be, smuggling it into the debate about food safety is ill-considered. Many people go out of their way to avoid eating GM foods while remaining complacently unaware of the evidently greater risks posed by foodborne pathogens in everyday meat, fruit and vegetable products.
It is remarkable that Nestle implicitly supports this misdirection of public vigilance. She is absolutely right to berate the food industry again and again for understating food safety risks in order to protect its economic and political interests.
But what is good for the goose ought also to be good for the gander - she should berate rather than applaud the anti-biotech lobby for its politically-motivated overstating of the safety risks associated with GM.
It is a pity that of the book's two sections, the one on food biotechnology is the less successful. Ambiguity and equivocation reign in what passes for the debate about GM, and the blend of hard science, political acumen and well-researched anecdote that Nestle elsewhere wields with greater force are sorely needed here.
Nevertheless, this remains an important book, and Nestle remains one of the most accessibly authoritative voices on issues of food science, politics and safety.
Safe Food deserves to be read by anyone interested in cultivating a more informed and discriminating basis on which to decide how much trust to place in those who provide us with the food we eat.
Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology and Bioterrorism
By Marion Nestle
University of California Press, 356pp.
£19.95
• Aengus Collins is a writer and critic