Mad Cow disease, bird flu epidemics, tainted meat scandals, and Mercury-laced fish - we are evidently surrounded by unsafe food. In this riveting and timely investigation, award-winning journalist Christopher D. Cook takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to explain why our entire food system - from farm to dinner table - is in crisis. Corporate consolidation of farms and supermarkets, profit margins padded at the expense of consumers, misplaced subsidies for exports, and inadequate regulation have all combined to produce a grim and costly harvest. Cook's forays into field, factory and food aisle turn up vegetables laminated by crop spray, "illegal" immigrants transported to the US to butcher diseased meat for the minimum wage, and the near extinction of American family farms. In the face of this food chain disaster, Cook offers a potent prescription to put things right: dramatic public investment to overhaul industrial agriculture and break up monopolies of distribution in ways that can satisfy the concerns of consumers, farmers, food-industry workers and the environment. Burgeoning support for organics and farmers' markets and the exponential growth of the slow food and food justice movements indicate a marked increase in public concern about what we eat. This book will spur on the campaign and direct it toward realizable and effective solutions.