EATING IN THE DARK: America's Experiment with Genetically Engineered Food

If we are what we eat, then we may be ingesting our way toward a sick new world: that's the gist of Hart's cautionary examination of how "Frankenstein food"—genetically modified food, particularly corn- and soy-based products—has come to fill grocery store shelves in the past decade. Hart, a health and environment writer for 15 years, is aghast that produce modified by biotech companies is not labeled. She is bewildered that consumer resistance has been much slower to develop in the United States than in Japan and in Europe, where test fields of modified sugar beets and oilseed have been destroyed by scythe-wielding "croppers." She worries about the impact of altered plants on pollinating bees and butterflies, and she fears the long-term health consequences of an uninformed and unsuspecting population becoming guinea pigs for an untested agricultural technology. For all her concerns, however, Hart is no one-note alarmist; the book is admirable for its exhaustive, balanced presentation and in its grasp of the science and the politics propelling the biotech industry. Some readers may find it a little dry. There are scattered colorful quotes from British protestors and angry American farmers, and there's the tale of a San Francisco woman who may have had a life-threatening allergic reaction to modified corn, but otherwise Hart's book is short on human-interest hooks and the storytelling punch carried by last fall's less fact-laden but more sprightly Lords of the Harvest, by Daniel Charles. (May 14)