By Jeff Benedict, a best-selling author and journalist
Before I wrote Poisoned, my wife Lydia spent two years trying to convince me to do a book on the food industry. I resisted, saying guys like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser did that. I write nonfiction stories, usually ones built around legal disputes. I couldn’t see how to do a compelling legal story around food.
Then something happened. Lydia revolutionized the way our family eats. This did not happen gradually. One week she cleaned out our cupboards and refrigerator, getting rid of everything from brand-name cereal to frozen meat to staple products like butter, flour, and sugar. Even the salt and pepper went. Then she restocked our kitchen with organic foods. We also started growing directly to small local farms to purchase our meat, poultry, and dairy products.
We didn’t stop here, though. We converted our 20-acre property into an organic fruit and vegetable farm. For a guy who grew up in a beach community in Connecticut, this was culture shock. But our four children loved it because we added horses, guinea fowl and chickens. We now collect close to twenty farm fresh eggs per day. On top of that we plant, water, weed, harvest and can. Now when we say grace, we mean it.
Besides improving the way I look and feel, this lifestyle change dramatically altered the way I look at food. The transformation got me searching earnestly for a food-related book topic. That’s when I came across Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer who has emerged as the country’s most influential advocate for food safety. Today, food safety is a serious public-health problem. The CDC estimates that food-borne disease causes about 48 million illnesses per year. Roughly one in six Americans get sick from bad food. Many of these cases are mild gastroenteritis, commonly referred to as the stomach bug. But too many food poisoning cases are more serious, resulting in approximately 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually. The fatalities are often children and the elderly.
alternative paths that these state documents take, and the possibilities that they raise, as we celebrate and critique the national Constitution on this