Beef, we were once told, is “real food for real people.” Nearly 60 years ago, an American presidential candidate promised “a chicken in every pot.” Much of the promise of American life seems to be associated with the enjoyment of meat. No wonder then that when a major beef producer was forced to recall 25 million pounds of hamburger last month, it was a front page story everywhere.

Tremont journalist Nicols Fox’s broad ranging and thoroughly researched work, “Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Haywire,” shows that the shocking E. coli outbreak in Colorado is only the tip of a dangerous iceberg. Such pathogens as E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter and listeria are responsible for between 80 and 266 million cases of food poisoning a year. At least 9,000 of those cases are fatal, with many involving young children. After years of encouraging consumers to enjoy rare hamburgers, the food industry and the media have now started — albeit belatedly — to issue warnings about meat preparation techniques. We are now instructed to monitor not only the temperature to which we heat meat but also every step of its delivery from grocery store to dinner plate.

These warnings beg an important question that Fox’s timely work addresses. Why have many of the foods we long safely brought into our homes become the nutritional equivalent of plutonium? Many of the animals arriving at slaughterhouses today have become contaminated with potent pathogens in large measure because of the ways they have been raised. The factory farm treats its animals as a kind of underclass. Raised in very tight environments, the animals readily develop diseases. In order to control disease, antibiotics are routinely administered. In the process, antibiotic- resistant and especially pathogenic bacterial strains have prospered — especially among the monocultures bred for factory farming. The animal waste produced by these virtual animal cities itself constitutes an enormous problem both in its volume and content.

The guts and hides of many animals arriving for processing are contaminated. Tightly packed in the journey to factory, many frightened animals discharge infected fecal matter on even the healthier members of the stock. Once within the factory walls, assembly line techniques and fast moving workers remove the intestines. Nonetheless, the speed and rigidity of the process make it inevitable that much bacteria is left behind. In the case of chicken, producers soak the birds in a liquid bath. Their goal is to add weight and thus increase their profits, but an unintended consequence is the further spread of Campylobacter in chicken.

Modern mass production of hamburger raises especially serious problems. Beef is ground from many sources, all of which are mixed. A problem with only a small number of cattle in one herd can eventually become pathogens in millions of pounds of hamburger shipped all over the country.

Food and the corporate economy then interact once again when chicken and burgers are prepared for us at many retail outlets. Our safety depends on skilled preparation of the food. Unfortunately, food service workers are among our most poorly paid and poorly trained workers. They are seldom given sick days, thereby encouraging them to work when sick. Other pathogens are thus often added to our food.

Our food today has become far less safe than that of several European nations. In some European states, the indiscriminate use of antibiotics is prohibited and far higher standards of biosecurity for animals have been instituted. More broadly, these states have also begun to develop common agricultural practice guidelines regarding the number of chickens to be raised in henhouses as well as other organic alternatives to industrial agriculture. As public consciousness of the problems grows there, so too does consumer demand for a different kind of agricultural practice.

Food-borne illness is a major public health problem, yet the attention it receives in the United States pales in comparison to the dimension of the problem. The current deregulatory fervor has encouraged cutbacks in public health departments all across the nation. Fox has high praise for Maine’s state epidemiologist, Dr. Kathleen Gensheimer, but remarks that she must work with very limited resources. Without a stronger public health presence, too many cases of suspected food poisoning are unexplored and health professionals receive too little information on the topic.

Fox’s work invites comparison to a classic of American progressive thought, Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” Like Sinclair, Fox has provided a compelling portrait of the ways unregulated markets, an obsession with profits, mistreatment of workers, and a shameful disregard for ecological limits interact to produce a social crisis. Although the climate in which she writes is ostensibly more conservative than Sinclair’s time, appearances may be as deceiving as our neatly packaged meats. There is much disenchantment with a corporate world that steals our jobs and livelihoods. A work that shows how disease infested corporate chickens have come home to roost even within the sanctuary of our own kitchens may catalyze not only safer food but healthier politics.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor.