Eating Dangerously

Michael Booth is the lead health care writer for The Denver Post and has covered health, medicine, health policy and politics throughout his twenty five-year journalism career. He was part of the team that won the 2013 and 2000 Pulitzer Prizes for Breaking News. He has made frequent appearances on commercial and public television and radio, and has won the National Education Writers’ Award, Best of the West, American Health Care Journalists honors, and other awards. He also co-led the coverage of the most deadly food-borne illness outbreak of the past century, the cantaloupe listeria illnesses of 2011, with Jennifer Brown. Their coverage of the listeria outbreak became the outline for a Congressional committee’s scathing report about what went wrong at the source farm and in the supply chain that sold the tainted melons.Jennifer Brown is an investigative reporter with The Denver Post and has covered health, medicine and health policy for the past decade. She was part of the team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. Brown led the team covering the two-year debate over national health care reform in 2009 and 2010. She has worked at The Associated Press, The Tyler Morning Telegraph in Texas, and The Hungry Horse News in Montana, and has won a National Headliner Award, three Katie awards and the 2013 Best of the West award for investigative journalism. Brown also has covered the Colorado Legislature, the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and child welfare reform. She co-led the coverage of the most deadly food-borne illness outbreak of the past century, the cantaloupe listeria illnesses of 2011, with Michael Booth.

• Part One: Should We Be Afraid of Our Food? 1: Sick:It’s What’s for Dinner. Is Anybody Keeping Our Food Safe?2: Too Many Cooks, Not Enough Test Tubes: Why a Broken Food-Safety System is Failing to Protect Us3: Tracing to Safety: The Real-Life “CSI” of an Outbreak4: The Whole World in Your Kitchen: That Hamburger Came from Five Nations5: Dirty Dishes: What Happens to the Perpetrators?Part Two: How to Feed Your Family Safely and Sanely6: Handle with Care – and Bleach – How to Avoid Illness, from the Shopping Cart to the Compost Heap7: Killer Sprouts and Slimy Spinach: The Most Dangerous Foods May Surprise You8: Dances with DNA, and Reconsidering Radiation: Will Mad Science Ruin Food or Save It?9: So Now You're Sick: How to Tell the Difference Between a “Touch of Food Poisoning” and Deadly Illness10: Eating Healthy and Eating Safe: No, They Aren’t the Same Thing

In 2011, award-winning journalists Booth and Brown reported on the major food poisoning outbreak (listeriosis) of the year in the US for the newspaper. Here they rework and expand the story and supplement it with more exciting data disseminated weekly by the government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The first sentence in the publisher's blurb for the book, 'Americans are afraid of their food,' sets the tone. From there, the authors proceed to reveal the hidden terror of germ warfare that underlies the process of bringing food from dirt to table. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. . . .General readers.