Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.

There was no cannery. They were instead smuggled to a pier in neighboring Thailand, where they were shoved aboard a wooden vessel that motored into a lawless sea. His uncle had fallen for the same scam five years prior and escaped to warn the others. But Sokha told his son, then just 16, that this venture would turn out differently. He was wrong.

“We worked constantly, for no pay, through seasickness and vomiting, sometimes for two or three days straight,” he said. “We obeyed the captain’s every word.”

Near-daily death threats reinforced the captain’s supremacy. So did his Vietnam War-era K-54 pistol, and the night he carved up another slave’s face in view of the crew. “For 20 hours a day, we were forced to catch and sort sea creatures: mackerel, crabs, squid.” It’s back-breaking work, under the searing tropical sun. “But the fish wasn’t for us,” he added.

So who was it all for?

The answer should unsettle anyone who closely examines Thailand’s multi-billion dollar wild-caught seafood industry and the darkest links in its supply chain.

“It’s an export-oriented market. And we know the countries where these products are exported to,” said Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical specialist with the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking or UNIAP. “Do the math.”

For Americans, the calculation is worrisome. Thailand is the United States’ second-largest supplier of foreign seafood. Of America’s total seafood imports, one out of every six pounds comes from the Southeast Asian nation.

In 2011 alone, Thailand exported 827 million pounds of seafood worth more than $2.5 billion to the US, according to National Marine Fisheries Service figures. The only nation that consumes more Thai seafood exports is Japan.

Murder is an occupational hazard. But a monotonous job assembling iPads is heaven compared to slavery on a Thai trawler, where conditions are as grueling and violent as any 19th-century American plantation. The lucky escape within a year or so. Less fortunate are those traded several times over for years on end.

Denying that the fruits of forced labor reach the biggest importers of Thai seafood — Japan, America, China and the European Union — has become increasingly implausible.

The accounts of ex-slaves, Thai fishing syndicates, officials, exporters and anti-trafficking case workers, gathered by GlobalPost in a three-month investigation, illuminate an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery.

A long trail of offshore operators — slave boats, motherships and independent fishmongers — can obfuscate the origins of slave-caught seafood before it ever reaches the shore. While the industry’s biggest earners rely on clannish and violence-prone fishing crews for raw material, they’re distanced from the worst abuses by hundreds of nautical miles and several degrees of middlemen.

The result is that many Thai factory bosses have no idea who caught the seafood they process for foreign consumers.

There are caveats. The majority of Thailand’s two largest seafood exports to the US — tuna and shrimp — are sourced differently. Most “Thai” tuna is actually imported from overseas and processed for re-export. The shrimp industry, though routinely accused of abusing poor migrants, is at least vulnerable to spot checks on seaside farms.

The same cannot be said for deep-sea trawlers, the favored vessel of slave-driving captains.

The species caught by Thai trawlers legal and illicit alike include sardines, mackerel, cuttlefish, squid, anchovies and “trash fish,” tiny or foul-tasting catch ground into animal food or preserved to create fish sauce. Americans consume these breeds en masse. One in five pounds of America’s imported mackerel or sardines comes from Thailand, according to US government records. For processed fish balls, puddings or cakes — made from trawlers’ trash fish — the figure is one in three pounds. Thai fish sauce supplies nearly 80 percent of the American market.

All that trawler catch ends up in familiar American fare: anchovy pizzas, squid linguine, smoked mackerel salads and fish fillets on ice. Even pets are entangled: trash fish is a common dog- and cat-food ingredient. But industry representatives in Thailand admit there’s often no way to tell whether a particular package of deep-sea fish was caught using forced labor.

Using bar codes, American shoppers can track packaged Thai-exported seafood to its onshore processing facility, said Arthon Piboonthanapatana, secretary general of the Thai Frozen Foods Association. “You can trace it back to the factories.”

But exporters, he said, are not in the business of policing the fishing syndicates that supply their factories. “We only have the power to enforce our members,” Arthon said. “We have no power to enforce other stakeholders such as boats or fishermen.”

American seafood importers consider themselves similarly powerless in overseeing far-flung Thai boats. “Western regulatory agencies have little or no reach, or authority, over various parts of the value chain,” said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, America’s chief seafood trade organization and lobbying group based outside Washington, DC. The institute will promptly respond to allegations against specific factories, he said. But so far, it has not found an effective way to monitor conditions on deep-sea boats catching US-bound fish.

“We have started discussions with our members about just how far an audit could realistically go and whether, perhaps, there are dockside audits that could be developed,” Gibbons said.

The “nature of boats being at sea,” he said, presents a major challenge to industry’s self-policing efforts.

International pressure to rid Thailand’s seafood trade of slavery is mounting. Thailand teeters just above the US State Department’s worst human-trafficking ranking and could be downgraded this summer. Last year, during a visit that vexed Bangkok officials, a UN rapporteur declared that forced labor is “notoriously common” in Thailand’s fishing sector and even alleged police complicity.

“It’s not like monitoring brothels, plantations or factories … all this labor is at sea,” Rende Taylor said. “So it’s essentially a universe where captains are king. Some are out to make as much money as possible by working these guys around the clock and being as cruel as they want to be.”

Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat’s question isn’t (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide so many horrific consequences from view.

Calling this the “politics of sight,” Pachirat’s blood-soaked experience inside a slaughterhouse spotlights only the most illustrative example of how we’ve divorced ourselves from the means of producing violence — and how, in doing so, we have made it psychologically easier to support such brutality. Sadly, billions of factory-farmed animals dying barbaric deaths are just one subset of casualties in that larger process.

Today, for example, free trade policies that promote offshoring allow Americans to enjoy consumer goods at ultra-low prices without having to see that those low prices represent companies taking advantage of the developing world’s poverty wages, environmental destruction and human rights abuses. A veritable slave may have assembled the iPad you are reading these words on, but thanks to the supply chain’s geography and Apple’s lack of transparency, you can easily avoid dealing with the ethical implications of that reality.

Another example: Many Americans drive gas-guzzling SUVs, proudly slapping patriotic declarations on their bumpers. This seems perfectly reasonable, but only because many either don’t live near polluted oil-drilling sites or don’t have to personally experience the ramifications of our petroleum-focused military policies. Ultimately, by separating the consequences of gas consumption from the driver, we’ve created the psychological conditions for fossil fuel consumption to seem like an honorable statement of strength rather than an endorsement of environmental degradation and war.

Speaking of war, the politics of sight sculpt our martial policies. We ended conscription, separating most of our fellow citizens from the consequences of military action; we conduct combat via unmanned aerial vehicles that remove the pilot-shooters from the populations being bombed; and both the military establishment and the media themselves suppress photographs of coffins or battlefield viscera that might show us what war really looks like.

Some of this, of course, is an inadvertent byproduct of larger trends like globalization that stretch supply chains across the planet. Some of it comes from a culture narcissism that teaches us to consider only on our immediate surroundings and nothing else. Much of it, though, is a deliberate effort to hide the truth. From the Pentagon’s photo policy to agribusiness now championing so-called ag gag laws to punish activists who expose factory farm atrocities, vested interests are exploiting the fact that “out of sight, out of mind” is a default setting in the human mind.

For his part, Pachirat ends his brave journey unconvinced that, unto itself, removing the veil will be enough to make us a more thoughtful — if not moral — society. He’s almost certainly correct. The atrocities that power modern life are now integral to what we define as the norm. And whether that norm is eating meat, driving massive cars or flippantly waging war, changing the status quo warrants more than just knowledge — it requires the will to change once knowledge is available.

Fortunately, history proves Americans can summon that will. However, without knowledge — without an end to the moment’s deceptive politics of sight — the most important changes can never happen.

She says she doesn’t particularly like killing animals, but she does kill from time to time, if she has good reason. A deer invaded her garden and she killed it with a machete, and she sometimes nets fish in the surf near her home on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico. It’s a skill born from practice and necessity: She grew up rural and poor. Her father abandoned her family when she was 8, and her mother, Esperanza, had to find a way to support seven children. “We ate a lot of natural things,” she says. “Things from the forest.  My brother used to kill iguanas. I’ve got a good iguana recipe if you want it. It’s the best meat as far as I’m concerned. There are two types of iguana: green and black. The black is good to eat. The green is too beautiful to kill. Last winter I found a big black one in my house! Can you believe it? The way you kill them is you step lightly on their heads and then pull on the tail.”

Humans worship athleticism, talent and perfection. We have a fascination with the tiny fraction of people who stand on the other side of the line that separates life from art: the grand master, the prima ballerina. We are drawn to people who embody something of the divine; the ones who, through their grace and inspiration, remind us that to be alive is majestic. Often these heroes in our spotlight are athletes. Sometimes they are leaders — warriors, politicians or rebels. Sometimes they are great chefs or composers or guitarists. But outside the spotlight and the enchantment of our collective worship, there are other artists, who turn mundane actions into magic, who approach humble tasks with perfect artistry. The masters of skills born of necessity and perfected to fulfill a pride that is autonomous from credit or accolades, a pride based on the perfection of the action itself, the economy of movement, the swiftness of results.

Jazmin Rudin is one such person. She possesses the grace and determination to execute any task at hand with astonishing efficiency. For example, she hunts shrimp in the river with a homemade metal spear. ”You take a long sharp piece of metal, filed at the end. It has to be really sharp. You attach that to a piece of surgical tubing so it snaps back to you when you throw it,” she says. She mimes aiming a spear, and remarks that on a good day she can spear two kilos of shrimp this way. I express disbelief. She shrugs.

“It’s a cultural thing. If you learn when you’re really little it’s easy enough. You have to learn because the shrimp are not going to come to your house and knock on your door.” She explains her technique: “The shrimp are under the rocks. You go underwater, and lift each rock. Don’t lift it all the way. You need to lift gently so they don’t see you.” She’s a demonstrative teacher. She talks slowly, and pauses to make eye contact. She’s checking to make sure I understand her. To help me get it, she uses hand motions. “They also like to hide in the roots of the trees that grow into the river; they hang out in there, caved up. Before you go for it, you have to check out all the potential exits they might have.” She mimes looking around and adds, “Sometimes you have to grab them with your hand, which can be prickly. But I say no! You’re for me. I don’t care if you bite me, you’re not escaping me!” She laughs. “But really, it’s all about taking aim. Just like hunting with a gun. When everything is correct you’ve got your shrimp.”

But hunting isn’t Jazmin’s only talent. The lectures on killing iguanas and spearing shrimp are just digressions: I’m here in her Oregon kitchen for a lesson in grilling chicken, estilo Mexicana. She learned this recipe for pollo asado from her mother, who raises chickens. Her mother learned it from her grandmother. Both women have lived their entire lives in the same small Guerrero village. Jazmin describes her grandmother as “muy antiquada,” or very antiquated. “She has Indian ways, folk ways,” Jazmin says. “There’s something a little witchy about her.”

Jazmin starts by butterflying a chicken thigh with a deft stroke of her knife. When I admire her technique she says, “My mother always says: ‘I know how to cook chicken, but you are the chicken maestro.’” There’s too much delight and humor in Jazmin’s countenance for this revelation to sound boastful. Besides, as I watch her demonstration, I realize she’s just stating a truth. “Take the leg,” she says. “Find the thickest part and slice it open, like so. Don’t cut it all the way through. Leave a layer of flesh so that you can fold the meat back. When you fold it open, the bones and meat are on one side, and there’s pure meat on the other side. You want to cut it so both sides are of equal thickness.” She slams the chicken leg flat on her cutting board. “Chickens prepared this way absorb more sauce,” she says and gives me a challenging look. I’m not about to argue with someone who can kill living shrimp with a handmade spear.

After salting the butterflied chicken legs and breasts, she sets the meat aside in a bowl and works on the sauce. “You’ll want to put seven dried chiles guajillos to soak in a bowl of water,” she says, helpfully adding, “It’s important to soak the chiles first, because it helps the chile to retain the red color.” She assembles her spices: powdered oregano, cumin seed, ground cloves and whole peppercorns, which she’ll grind in a stone mortar and pestle, or molcajete. The basalt bowl stands on its own three legs; the grinding stone is the size and texture of an avocado. “In Mexico everyone has the rock,” she says, laughing. “But if you don’t have a molcajete, use the blender. It’s not quite the same, but it works.” To make the sauce, she places two cloves of garlic and strips of wet chile in the molcajete, and then deftly adds spices and water a little at a time. The finished result is a uniform liquid, which she ladles over the chicken.

While the chicken marinates and the grill heats, we talk. Jazmin’s pueblo on the coast of Guerrero sounds a lot like the village in coastal Jalisco where I spent part of my childhood. It’s a rural culture, rooted in farming and fishing and family. Jazmin has always felt different from the other girls in town; she’s never cared for makeup or clothes. “I’m old-fashioned like my grandmother,” she admits. But although her values may be old-fashioned, she’s not exactly a textbook campesina: Her great joy in life is surfing, she raves about Hank Williams III, and she’s taught her dog, Rambo, to ride on the front of her four-wheeler. She married Mark, an older guy from Oregon, when she was 19, so that could help explain her cultural idiosyncrasies. But as I watch Jazmin laugh uproariously at a silly joke, it strikes me that even without the foreign influence, she would have been an oddball. She’s one of those rare individuals who always cleaves true to some inner compass.

“The secret to barbecuing chicken is to make sure the flame isn’t too hot,” she says, holding her hand over the gas grill, which she views with some contempt. We’re standing on a back porch in Bend, Ore., and Jazmin has been waxing poetic about the superiority of Mexican chickens. “In Mexico, we get a chicken that’s been killed that day. And it’s double good when you grill it over real coals; these gas grills have nothing on real charcoal.” She slaps a chicken thigh on the grill. “Keep turning the chicken over and over again,” she instructs. “It’s a totally different style. Not as juicy maybe, but more flavorful.” She’s right; when we pull the chicken off the grill a scant 20 minutes later, the meat has a satisfying, chewy texture and the flavor sings, savory and complex. Jazmin gives me a look, as though to say, “I told you so.”

“What do you call this recipe?” I ask.

“It’s called pollo asado,” she says, grinning. Grilled chicken. The answer is pure Jazmin: no nonsense and uttered with the easy confidence of a maestro. Like any great artist, she knows to let her work speak for itself.

“We have a smear campaign going on against a product that is healthy and safe,” Branstad said. “If they get by with this, what other food products are they going to attack next?”

Score another scalp for social media. Because when Terry Branstad inveighs against “they,” that’s exactly who he’s talking about: the easily outraged masses of Twitter and Facebook. We’ve known about “pink slime” for years. Food Inc. took us into a Beef Products Inc. factory and showed us the repulsive stuff back in 2008. The New York Times referenced the name (coined by a USDA researcher as far back as 2002) and devastatingly punctured the safety claims in a breakthrough piece of reporting in 2009. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver blasted it on his reality TV show a full year ago.

But only in the last few weeks has pink slime captured the national consumer consciousness, and in doing so provided us with just the latest example of how quickly social media grass fires can become conflagrations with real dollar-and-cents consequences. On March 5, the Daily reported that the USDA was holding firm to its plans to buy 7 million pounds of pink slime for its national school lunch program. The very next day Bettina Siegel, a blogger who writes extensively about food and kids, created a petition on Change.org titled “Tell USDA to Stop Using Pink Slime in School Food.” Within a week the petition had over 200,000 signatories and an Internet frenzy had been born.

Fox News columnist Dan Gainor would have us believe that the real villain here is ABC News, which jumped on the anti-pink slime bandwagon with particular passion, but make no mistake, “pink slime” is a semantic framing that was born for the Twitter era. When you have only 140 characters to spread the news, “pink slime” packs all the wallop you need. The process itself, in which fatty trimmings left over at the slaughterhouse are heated, disintegrated via centrifuge, and then dosed with ammonia, is easy to express in a simple Facebook illustration. We saw it with Susan G. Komen for the Cure and we saw it with SOPA — when the social media masses get a bee in their bonnet, they can’t be stopped.

Certainly, the beef industry knows whom it is blaming.

From the Kansas City Star:

The outrage over pink slime registered the sort of quick and virulent response that seems to characterize a new media age. Janet Riley, spokeswoman for the industry group the American Meat Institute, said she’d never seen anything like it — not with E.coli outbreaks, passing worries about so-called mad cow disease or sundry health studies.

“It’s been a social phenomenon,” she said. “Twitter just made it crazy.”

The beef processing industry is trying to fight back, with websites – Beef Is Beef, Pink Slime Is a Myth – and even a catchy slogan, “Dude, it’s beef.” Pink slime contrarians are also eager to point out that if we want low prices for our burgers and “efficient” use of our beef resources, we should learn to embrace pink slime. But I suspect that the defenders of “lean, finely textured beef” are unlikely to see a social media wave of support break in their favor.

I may be the wrong person to make this argument, as I am a Berkeley, Calif., resident who feeds his children hamburgers made from grass-fed cows raised in Marin. But the questions of whether “pink slime” is safe or efficient or guarantees us low-cost patties are all beside the point. It is impossible to look at the beef trimmings being transformed into pink goo in “Food Inc.” without being revolted. And when American consumers are revolted, they don’t reach for their wallets. Gov. Rick Perry can warn all he wants about how “social media rumors” and “hysteria” threaten to destroy any industry. Maybe that’s even true. But it’s not social media’s fault that pink slime is getting a bad rap. It’s the inherent disgustingness of the process that deserves the blame. When you see it, or think hard about the process that creates it, you just don’t want to eat it.

What’s amazing about the current social media revolution is that it is bringing to pass something that food activists have been dreaming about for decades: If only consumers were more informed about the nature of the industrial food system, they would change their behavior. Well, guess what, with a little help from grass-roots viral marketing, the activists turn out to have been right.

These days, our fears rest not on wariness about that new plant we just came across in the wild, but on fears about what has been done to our food before it reaches our tables. These are the natural result of the growth of a market economy that inserted middlemen between producers and consumers of food. In recent years the ways in which industrialization and globalization have completely transformed how the food we eat is grown, shipped, processed, and sold have helped ratchet up these fears much further.

As a glance at a web page exposing “urban legends” will indicate, there are an amazing number of bizarre fears about our food supply (often involving Coca-Cola) always floating about. These might provide some insight into the nature of conspiracy theories, but they are not the kind of fear that interest me. What interests me are fears that have had the backing of the nation’s most eminent scientific, medical, and governmental authorities. Many of them were the most eminent nutritional scientists of their time. The government agencies involved were staffed by experts at the top of their fields. Yet, as we shall see, many of the fears they stoked turned out to be either groundless or at best unduly exaggerated. Others involved frightening all Americans about things that should concern only a minority. These scares, and the anxiety about food they have created, result from a confluence of forces that since the end of the nineteenth century have transformed how Americans eat and think about their food.

First and foremost is something that contemporary home economists often noted: that for many years the production and preparation of food has been steadily migrating out of the home. In the country’s early years, when 90 percent of Americans lived on farms, the outsiders handling their food were mainly millers and vendors of essentials like salt and molasses. One usually had a personal, trusting relationship with these suppliers, who were often neighbors.

By the late nineteenth century, though, industrialization, urbanization, and a transportation revolution had transformed the nation. Cities boomed, railroads crisscrossed the nation, massive steamships crowded its ports, and urbanites were provided with foods that were not only not grown by neighbors — they were not even grown in neighboring countries. Large impersonal companies were now in charge of the canning, salting, refining, milling, baking, and other ways of preserving and preparing foods that had previously been done at home or by neighbors.

All along the way, the foods passed through the hands of strangers with plenty of opportunities to profit by altering them, to the detriment of the quality and the healthfulness of the foods. There was, then, plenty of reason to mistrust what had happened to food before it reached the table.

These natural concerns were heightened by modern science. In the late nineteenth century, nutritional scientists discovered that food was not just undifferentiated fuel for the human engine. Rather, they said, it consisted of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, each of which played a different role in preserving health. Only scientists could calculate how much of them were necessary. They then laid much of the groundwork for modern anxiety about food by warning that taste was the least reliable guide to healthy eating.

At the same time, fears were stoked by the new germ theory of disease. That contemporary Americans fear food more than the French is rather ironic, for many modern food fears originated in France. It was there, in the 1870s, that the scientist Louis Pasteur transformed perceptions of illness by discovering that many serious diseases were caused by microscopic organisms called microbes, bacteria, or germs. This “germ theory” of disease saved innumerable lives by leading to the development of a number of vaccines and the introduction of antiseptic procedures in hospitals. However, it also fueled growing fears about what industrialization was doing to the food supply.

Of course, fear of what unseen hands might be doing to our food is natural to omnivores, but taste, sight, smell (and the occasional catastrophic experience) were usually adequate for deciding what could or could not be eaten. The germ theory, however, helped remove these decisions from the realms of sensory perception and placed them in the hands of scientists in laboratories.

By the end of the nineteenth century, these scientists were using powerful new microscopes to paint an ever more frightening picture. First, they confirmed that germs were so tiny that there was absolutely no way that they could be detected outside a laboratory. In 1895 the New York Times reported that if a quarter of a million of one kind of these pathogenic bacteria were laid side by side, they would only take up an inch of space. Eight billion of another variety could be packed into a drop of fluid. Worse, their ability to reproduce was nothing short of astounding. There was a bacillus, it said, that in only five days could multiply quickly enough to fill all the space occupied by the waters of Earth’s oceans.

The reported dangers of ingesting germs multiplied exponentially as well. By 1900 Pasteur and his successors had shown that germs were the cause of deadly diseases such as rabies, diphtheria, and tuberculosis. They then became prime suspects in many ailments, such as cancer and smallpox, for which they were innocent. In 1902 a U.S. government scientist even claimed to have discovered that laziness was caused by germs. Some years later Harvey Wiley, head of the government’s Bureau of Chemistry, used the germ theory to explain why his bald head had suddenly produced a full growth of wavy hair. He had discovered, he said, that baldness was caused by germs in the scalp and had conquered it by riding around Washington, D.C., in his open car, exposing his head to the sun, which killed the germs.

America’s doctors were initially slow to adopt the germ theory, but public health authorities accepted it quite readily. In the mid-nineteenth century, their movement to clean up the nation’s cities was grounded in the theory that disease was spread by invisible miasmas — noxious fumes emanating from putrefying garbage and other rotting organic matter. It was but a short step from there to accepting the notion that dirt and garbage were ideal breeding grounds for invisible germs.

Indeed, for a while the two theories coexisted quite happily, for it was initially thought that bacteria flourished only in decaying and putrefying substances — the very things that produced miasmas. It was not difficult, then, to accept the idea that foul-smelling toilets, drains, and the huge piles of horse manure that lined city streets harbored dangerous bacteria instead of miasmas. Soon germs became even more frightening than miasmas. Scientists warned that they were “practically ubiquitous” and were carried to humans in dust, in dirty clothing, and especially in food and beverages.

The idea that dirt caused disease was accepted quite easily by middle-class Americans. They had been developing a penchant for personal cleanliness since early in the nineteenth century. Intoning popular notions such as “cleanliness is next to godliness,” they had reinforced their sense of moral superiority over the “great unwashed” masses by bathing regularly and taking pride in the cleanliness of their houses. It was also embraced by the women teaching the new “domestic science” in the schools, who used it to buttress their shaky claims to be scientific. They could now teach “bacteriology in the kitchen,” which meant learning “the difference between apparent cleanliness and chemical cleanliness.”

But the most fearsome enemy in the war against germs was not a lovable pet, but the annoying housefly. Dr. Walter Reed’s investigations of disease among the American troops who invaded Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898 had famously led to the discovery that mosquitoes carried and spread the germs that caused yellow fever. But yellow fever was hardly present in the United States. Much more important was his subsequent discovery that houseflies could carry the bacteria causing typhoid to food, for that disease killed an estimated 50,000 Americans a year. Although Reed’s studies had shown that this could happen only when flies were practically immersed in human, not animal, excrement, his observations soon metamorphosed into the belief that during the war typhoid-carrying flies had killed more American soldiers than had the Spanish. This was buttressed by a kind of primitive epidemiology, wherein experts noted that typhoid peaked in the autumn, when the fly population was also at its peak.

Of course, it took much more than just some frightening ideas to arouse Americans about their food. The immense amounts of money involved in the food industries meant that, inevitably, huge financial stakes were involved as well. However, the stakeholders were not just the usual suspects, the large corporations that dominated food production. They also included much less mendacious interests as well.

Well-meaning public health authorities sought to demonstrate their importance by issuing exaggerated warnings about food dangers. Home economists helped justify their role in the education system by teaching how proper eating would avoid life-threatening diseases. During World War II, the federal government propagated the misguided notion that taking vitamins would make up for the deficiencies caused by food processing and help the nation defend itself from invasion. After the war, nonprofit philanthropies such as the American Heart Association raised billions of dollars in donations to spread the message that eating the wrong foods was killing millions of Americans. Scientific and medical researchers were awarded many more billions in government and corporate grants for studies warning about the dangers of eating fats, sugar, salt, and a host of other foods.

But the resulting food fears needed a receptive audience, and that is precisely what middle-class Americans were primed to be. By the early twentieth century, they had become the dominant force in American culture. Because they mainly lived in cities and large towns, they benefited most from the innovations in transportation, processing, and marketing that led to greatly expanded food choices. However, the resulting erosion of the reassuring personal relationships between sellers and buyers made them particularly susceptible to food scares. The media now became their major source of information about the safety of their food. Since much of this information was now scientific in origin, it was therefore the middle-class media — “quality” newspapers and magazines, and, later, radio and television news and public affairs shows — that played the major roles in disseminating it.

The residual Puritanism of the American middle class also helped make them susceptible to food fears. A culture that for hundreds of years encouraged people to feel guilty about self-indulgence, one that saw the road to salvation as paved by individual self-denial, made them particularly receptive to calls for self-sacrifice in the name of healthy living. This helped them lend a sympathetic ear to scientific nutritionists’ repeated warnings that good taste — that is, pleasure — is the worst guide to healthy eating.

By the end of the twentieth century, this guilt-ridden culture seemed to have weakened, as the notion that self-indulgence would benefit both individuals and society gained ground. However, at the heart of this more solipsistic view of life there still lay the old idea that illness and death were the result of an individual’s own actions, including — and often especially — how they ate. (“Americans,” a British wag has remarked, “like to think that death is optional.”) As a result, middle-class Americans have lurched from worrying about one fear of alimentary origin to another, with no apparent end in sight.

The spread of AIDS in the 1980s once more aroused public fears of the spread of infectious diseases. A slew of movies, television programs, and newspaper and magazine articles on bioterrorism stirred this pot. Commercial interests smelled opportunity in this and began stoking germophobia in promoting their soaps, detergents, and even prescription drugs. In 1992 a marketing journal wrote of how in the past four years this promotion of “germ warfare” had led to “amazing” growth in sales of home hygiene products. Then, in 1997 Pfizer introduced a consumer version of Purell, the hand sanitizer it developed for the medical profession, and mounted a fearmongering advertising campaign to promote it. Its success spurred other companies to join in and use germophobia to promote a host of competing disinfectants. Pfizer then responded with Purell 2-Go, small bottles of which could be attached to backpacks, lunch boxes, and key chains, so that people could disinfect their way through the outside world.

The SARS scare in 2004 heightened germophobia even more. Even though SARS was spread by a virus, not a bacterium, most Americans were unaware of the difference. They began snapping up a panoply of germicidal products such as contraptions that sprayed disinfectant on doorknobs, portable subway straps (for those who did not have “City Mitts” anti-microbial gloves), and, to combat germs in airplanes, the Air Supply Ionic Personal Air Purifier. A book called “Germs Are Not for Sharing” instructed children in how to play without touching each other. Those fearing germs on fruits and vegetables could buy the Lotus Sanitizing System, which used an electric charge to infuse tap water with ozone that would kill the bacteria on them — a process not unlike the Electrozone treatment that was purported to turn sea water into a disinfectant a hundred years earlier.

By then, of course, the water supply had once again fallen under suspicion, leading to the enormous growth of the bottled water industry. However, nothing could shake Americans’ confidence that breakfast cereals, dairy products, and other foods in brightly colored, tightly wrapped packages were free of harmful bacteria. It all amounted to impressive testimony to the ongoing effectiveness of advertising campaigns such as those mounted by Kellogg’s and Nabisco in the early twentieth century.

This represented yet another irony: that many of the fears that originated in the industrialization of the food supply were ultimately dissipated by the kind of packaging and marketing that were integral parts of it.

Excerpted with permission from “Fear of Food: Why We Worry About What We Eat,” by Harvey Levenstein, from University of Chicago Press.