Toxic To The Tongue

Frontier communities had a quick and certain remedy for anyone who poisoned the town's well: they hanged the son-of-a-bitch. Today, though, when the ag economists draw up their efficiency equations, well poisoning is not even marked down as a cost charged to the poisoners--instead, it's dismissed as an "externality." Did people get breast cancer? Did the pesticides run off into the bay and shut down the fishing industry? Was a farmworker's baby born with birth defects? Hey, pal, stuff happens, life ain't fair, not our fault, get out of the way of progress . . . and if you're so prissy about poisons, maybe you oughta start boiling your water.

--Texas radio commentator Jim Hightower, from "Fatal Harvest"

To step into the gallery of photos in "Fatal Harvest," a most unusual coffee-table book, is akin to spiraling downward into Dante's nine circles of hell. Avarice and deceit take on the characters not of Dante's Malacoda or Geryon, but of industrial agriculture's multinational corporations: Monsanto, Philip Morris, Archer Daniels Midland. The book tells the story of how in the years after World War II, food-producing corporations found a renewed purpose for the noxious chemicals developed to protect soldiers from insects (including DDT and malathion): As pesticides, they would expand industrial agriculture. For decades these corporations doused the soil on massive farms with these toxins, with the aim of growing more food, more efficiently, and reaping vast profits. In the meanwhile, they have often knowingly and gradually poisoned countless generations of plants, animals, and humans.

"Fatal Harvest" is an oversized handbook for those who would fight back. Packed with statistics and anecdotes, both verbal and visual, this collaboration between design and prose makes concrete the problems of industrial agriculture, and dramatizes the disconnect between what we eat and how it is created. There is some fine writing here, with essays by prominent environmental thinkers such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Jerry Mander, and Vandana Shiva. The essays are short, but not light; some are preachy, some shocking. But "Fatal Harvest" is not merely strongly worded. The 11 3/4-inch by 12 1/4-inch book literally illustrates America's current food crisis, with some 250 sweeping photographs of pesticide-soaked industrial farms, rivers filled with chemical runoff, and the like. And it contrasts those bleak images with more familiar coffee-table fare -- lushly diverse organic farms, the 50-odd types of tomato you'll never see at Food Emporium.

That the politics of food, and in particular, the organic food movement, are moving steadily forward into the mainstream consciousness is evidenced by the bestseller status conferred upon two excellent recent books, "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan and "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser, and by the decisions of a growing number of supermarket chains to offer organic foods.

"Fatal Harvest" is divided into seven parts. Of particular interest is Part Two, which provides a rousing response to myths perpetuated by multinational agricultural corporations. A sample:

Large-scale industrial farms help feed the nearly "800 million people who go hungry each day." No, argues "Fatal Harvest." "World hunger is not created by lack of food but by poverty and landlessness, which deny people access to food."

Industrial food is safe, healthy, and nutritious. No, argues "Fatal Harvest." "Since 1989, overall pesticide use has risen by about 8 percent, or 60 million pounds . . . in 1998, the FDA found pesticide residues in over 35 percent of the food tested . . . the average hamburger . . . may receive the equivalent of millions of chest X rays in an attempt to temporarily remove any potential bacterial contaminants."