Spoiled apple juice. Tainted fast-food hamburgers. Contaminated raspberries. As reports of food-borne disease make the headlines with alarming regularity, we are beginning to wonder if every bite we take poses a risk. Are these food scares mere hype and hysteria, or is there a bigger and more frightening story behind the headlines?

Journalist Nicols Fox tells in arresting detail what has happened to food and why. Drawing from scientific and medical journals and more than 100 interviews with epidemiologists, physicians, food scientists, USDA and FDA officials, farmers, distributors, and consumer victims, her findings are fascinating, provocative, and terrifying. Spoiled reveals -- for the first time -- how in the last twenty-five years we lost control of our food supply to a tangled and messy chain of factory farming and processing, high-tech packaging, mass distributors, and importing and exporting. By changing the way we produce, process, distribute, store, and prepare food, we have upset the subtle ecological balances of the food chain -- and we have only begun to pay the price.