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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

THIS IS NOT another book to tell you that your food is saturated with poisons and that you need a special guidebook if you want to survive. Nor will I tell you that the food you eat is the safest in the world and that you need not worry because General Foods will take care of you. Nor will I exhort you to fill up on oat bran and lettuce to avert a heart attack or to eat more beef to help save the farmers. Increasingly, the acts of everyday life, eating, and the transfiguration of food into flesh and fertilizer, appear to involve agonizing, globally significant choices, explained to us by self-important authors in technical tomes and prophetic warnings.

Eating does involve globally significant choices, and this book will explain what they are. But, as Beatle George Harrison once said, life goes on within you and without you. In the end, this is a book about enjoying—no, thrilling at—the true meaning of eating. It is about intimacy, love, vomiting, and diarrhea.

This book is about the celebration of ecology through eating and about how foodborne disease can save the world. This book should be kept next to your toilet and also next to the refrigerator. The next time you are doubled over with abdominal pain, feeling like you have never felt before the true revolution within, feeling like your liver is coming up your throat, like you want to die, I want you to understand what is happening to you, why the inner child is having a gaseous tantrum in your guts. I want you to hear Gaia’s, the earth organism’s, whispered love message to you so that your suffering is not in vain. I want you to feel good about yourself, to return to the table with fire in your eyes, laughter in your belly, and hands that have been very thoroughly washed.

This is your mother talking. Did you remember to flush? Read on.