Consuming a healthy dose of reality> Book challenges consumers to become more knowledgeable about food

BASS HARBOR — Nicols Fox wants you to become a “dragon consumer.” That’s right, a dragon consumer.

She wants you to be able to make a choice whether or not to buy a food item based on its label. She wants the label to tell you whether the food is disease free. She wants you to know that the food you consume now may be hazardous to your health.

In her just published book, “Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire,” Fox, a former panelist on Maine Public Television’s “Media Watch” and a regular contributor to The Economist, tells you her reasons for wanting you to become a dragon consumer. They are compelling ones that involve the eggs you may be boiling for breakfast, the chicken you’re broiling for dinner, the hamburgers you’re grilling this weekend.

After four years of research and writing, she can tell you too many stories about how those foods — and the several forms of bacteria, from E. coli to super salmonella, that have found their way into them — have sickened millions and caused the death of thousands each year. That’s right, each year. In fact, she can make the claim that an American dies nearly every day from eating a hamburger, an item not often considered a lethal weapon.

She can tell you the dangers lurking in our food in simple, easy-to-understand terms or, as deftly, in the scientific terminology that is the lingua franca at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a place she has become particularly familiar with in her travels. If you think the issues she deals with in her book are important, you can ask her about them yourself at 7:30 tonight at Borders in Bangor, where she’ll be talking to people about “Spoiled” and signing copies. It’s the first stop on a national tour to promote the book.

While Fox describes “Spoiled” as “more a science book, a book of ecology,” it is journalism in the public interest. Passages in it tell the stories of real people suffering the dire consequences of what she calls “unintentional and uncoordinated shifts in our relationship to what we eat.”

The book is dedicated to one such person, Mary Heersink of Alabama, whose son Damion was diagnosed with hemolytic uremic syndrome, a condition Heersink and her physician husband had not heard of, but which attacks one organ after another and, in just 15 years, has become the leading cause of renal failure in children in the United States and Canada. Fox leads us through the harrowing progress of Damion’s affliction to its source — hamburger — and to a discussion of America’s love affair with beef on a bun and the forces that have made the relationship possible — and lethal. This story has a happy ending: Damion survives. Not everyone does.

At first glance, what Fox describes appears to be overwhelming as she lays the cause of the increasing virulence of food-born disease at society’s doorstep, at the values we embrace, at the standards we have set for ourselves. She writes that “our compulsion to simplify is at the heart of our errors,” that “we can’t accept the complexities of the natural world,” that “efficiency is the premier standard,” that we pursue pleasure, novelty and ease while we ignore tradition and the laws of nature.

The ways food is produced, processed and distributed — the increasing miles it travels to market, the multiplying numbers of hands that handle it, the baggage it carries with it in the form of microbes — create opportunities for contamination, “niches” for the development of pathogens.

“When we import strawberries from Guatemala, we are importing an environment,” she says. Not only do the consumers get the berries, they get the soil they were grown in, the water they were doused with, the touch of the people who picked, packed and shipped them.

What she describes — and what appears initially so overwhelming — is the developing world market. In a world economically smaller, where nothing manufactured seems to be from one single source, the same is happening with food. Her response: “I’m not daunted. I’m not in the least bit daunted.”

Fox believes in consumer action, and the key to that is information. That she supplies in her book. While many of her sources are government documents and scientific studies, she gives due credit to people like Mary Heersink who have experienced the worst firsthand and have taken action, individually and with others, to enlighten people about the costs that must be paid for the way we deal with food today.

“In countries where food is changing, it’s because consumers change it,” Fox says, consumers that are dragons.