Book Note

Morton Satin. Death in the Pot: The Impact of Food Poisoning on History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007. 258 pp. $24.

Reviewed by Gabriella Petrick

In this uneven history of food-related illness Satin recounts many instances of suspected or proven food poisoning from prehistory to today. He discusses the anthropological and archeological evidence to support both large- and small-scale outbreaks of food-borne illness and contaminated foods. Satin tends to treat all outbreaks equally whether they harmed thousands of people or only a single person. His tendency to conflate food adulteration, infection, and intoxication is confusing. Food's significance to particular historical events is often overstated: that Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin is important, but not because he may have eaten the poison. Additionally, the chronology of the book is often confusing—gout cases from the 18th and 19th centuries are placed in the chapter on the ancient Greeks and Romans, and a Chinese case of rat-poisoned noodles from 2001 is in the chapter on the industrial revolution. While Satin's goal of explaining how food poisoning influenced historical events is laudable, the book falls far short of the mark. More generally, Satin relies too heavily on secondary and Web-based sources, which leads him to overstate how important many of his examples are in a larger historical context. All told it is a disjointed look at a number of instances in which food has contributed to illness.