Death In The Pot is a series of not very well organized and not very technical but generally entertaining anecdotes about “food poisoning”, in a very broad sense of the expression. I’ve always taken “food poisoning” to mean food contamination with a pathogen or microbial toxin – botulism, Norwalk virus, etc. - author Morton Satin uses it to mean just about any ill effect connected with eating, including cases where the food itself is poisonous (“mad honey”, fugu); where the food has been accidentally (lead poisoning from cooking implements) or deliberately (lead acetate in wine, tri-o-cresyl phosphate in Jamaican ginger extract) adulterated; and deliberate poisoning for murder or terrorism (the Rajneeshees and Salmonella, Viktor Yushchenko and “dioxin”). Some of stories are pretty distant from “food poisoning”; for example, Satin discusses the assassination of Georgi Markov with ricin – which was injected, not ingested.


Interestingly, about half of Satin’s references are Web sites. My initial thought was that he was just hacking something together without a lot of library research, but with the benefit of the doubt he might be trying to make the material more accessible for the interested reader without access or time to use an academic library.


The Jamaican ginger extract story is worth a little more detail. Jamaican ginger extract was allowed into the US during Prohibition as a “medicine”, even though it was 70% alcohol. The ginger extract was supposed to make the stuff undrinkable in quantity; however, a clever bootlegger quickly found that the Treasury Department was testing it by distillation. If 30% of the original liquid remained after distillation at 250 F, it was assumed the residue was ginger extract. All that was needed was some tasteless liquid that didn’t boil below 250 F, and you could mix it with alcohol, sell it as ginger extract, and clean up. After various experiments with ethylene glycol, dibutyl phthalate, and castor oil, tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate, normally a nonflammable hydraulic fluid, became the “inert” ingredient. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be inert and habitual “Jake” drinkers started to get various ailments, most commonly paralysis that became known as “Jake Leg”. A number of songs commemorating the victims came out – “The Jake Leg Blues”, the “Jake Leg Rag”, and so on. Those were the good old days; I expect it will be a while before we hear a rap about Escherichia coli O157:H7.


Worth reading, especially for dinner party anecdotes where you want more food for yourself. ( )

Satin is a molecular biologist and former director of the UN's Food and Agriculture division. He is undoubtedly a much better biologist than he is writer. His writing is turgid and dry. He makes his explanations of basic biological concepts as tangled and convoluted as possible. His grasp on history is even weaker. It's clear that he depends heavily on only a few sources, and takes them at their word; no cross-referencing or double-checking for him! The book is supposed to trace food poisoning from prehistoric periods to 2006, but it's a slap-dash, poorly organized, seemingly random bunch of essays.

I did like seeing the numerous instances in which the establishment was slow-moving (to the point of criminality) in reacting to food adulteration. From the Roman government's slow reaction to sapa to the Japanese government's refusal to hold corporations responsible for their industrial waste, this is an age-old problem. The range of ways food can be dangerous to humans is very wide and quite fascinating. Still, I would definitely not recommend reading this book. ( )

Reads as if a bunch of mediocre term papers were bound. ( )