Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna

Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats Reviews

• 
  Peacegal

  At this moment, most meat animals, across most of the planet, are raised with the assistance of doses of antibiotics on most days or their lives: 63,151 tons of antibiotics per year, about 126 million pounds. Farmers began using the drugs because antibiotics allowed animals to convert feed to tasty muscle more efficiently; when that result made it irresistible to pack more livestock into barns, antibiotics protected animals against the likelihood of disease.
  -from BIG CHICKEN, Maryn McKenna
  
  Who should read this book:
  Legislators, policy makers (especially in the food industry), and the millions of people who eat the standard American diet of lots of chicken and animal products.
  
  Who will read this book:
  People who have switched to only local organic meat, people who don’t eat meat at all, scientists and consumer advocates already aware of the problem.
  
  Like so many issues involving the food industry, the misuse of antibiotics in agriculture is one that has serious ramifications beyond the farm, or even the individual consumer. McKenna meticulously details the parallel history of antibiotics and the discovery of their potential applications in the food industry. The author details the early objections to the reckless use of these “wonder drugs” and the ways in which objections were squelched until we get to today’s situation in which “eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the US and more than half of those sold around the world are used in animals, not in humans.”
  
  The grimness of this situation was observed early on in both the laboratory and the field: as simple organisms, bacteria can mutate and evolve extremely quickly. When exposed to the antibiotics that are used so frequently on farmed animals to help the animals gain weight and stave off disease, the microorganisms develop resistance to the medications designed to fight them. These bacteria can (and do) go on to infect human beings.
  
  Antibiotic-resistant infections aren’t something most of us think about until it hits home, but they cause 23,000 deaths and two million serious illnesses annually in the US alone. The individual stories McKenna collects are indeed heartbreaking. And because these infections jump not just from animal to person, but from person to person—they can infect anybody. From people who eat chicken daily to lifelong vegans, we are all at risk of being struck down by the bacteria originating in the factory farms and feedlots.
  
  Despite this clear and present danger that transcends individual values and politics, anyone familiar with the American way of government should not be surprised at how difficult it has been for legislators to even get a clear look at the issue, let alone make laws regarding it. From early on, antibiotic use was a bonanza for the pharmaceutical and meat companies. It could be argued that they, in fact, intimately relied on each other. McKenna writes:
  
  Antibiotics have been so difficult to root out of modern meat because, in a crucial way, they created it. The drugs made it irresistible to load more animals into barns and protected animals and their growers from the consequences of that crowding.
  
  This, along with generous subsidies, made meat a cheap commodity that most Americans could now afford to eat daily, and often multiple times per day. And no industry has benefited more from these changes in meat production than the chicken business.
  
  Today, a meat chicken’s slaughter weight is twice what it was 70 years ago and is achieved in half the time. Across these decades, chickens went from a scarce and expensive Sunday treat to the meat that Americans eat more often than any other…
  
  Six weeks, a modern broiler’s age at slaughter, the author notes, would be barely preteen in a purebred chicken. Top-heavy, lethargic, and frequently suffering from a variety of production-based maladies, the modern broiler chicken is memorably compared in the text to “an olive balancing on two toothpicks.” Although not normally thought of as babies, today’s chickens are exactly that: they are younger at slaughter than either lambs or crate-raised veal calves; and their suffering and lack of motion is comparable to that of the calves in the much-despised “white” veal industry.
  
  Although not the main focus of this book, McKenna is to be praised for bringing animal welfare concerns into the fold. While eats and describes the flavor of differently-raised chickens throughout the book, she visits chicken farmers and discusses the business with them. Some of them think “animal welfare” is just about making sure the animals have adequate feed and water and roll their eyes at any kind of enrichment or natural settings for the birds. Others are more sensitive. The author introduces a remorseful farmer who looks over his vast chicken houses and muses, “I would never say I treat my birds badly, but the way the system is set up, I can’t take good care of them…The industry says they care about animal welfare, they don’t…The image and the reality, they’re too far apart.”
  
  Most informed adults now have at least some grasp on what “factory farming” is. Almost all US chickens (and other animals) have been raised for decades in this manner. It has made meat a cheap, universally available, and standardized product. Yes, as the author refreshingly notes, the burden of all of this doesn’t just lie on the huge, faceless corporations.
  
  It is the foundation of the chicken economy, and it is endorsed every day by anyone who ever bought a fast-food chicken sandwich, ordered wings in a bar, or picked up an extra tray of drumsticks because a supermarket put them on sale.
  
  Yet, food, and particularly meat, touches a nerve in people that isn’t as universally present in other controversial, daily presences in people’s lives. Even as it behaves in ways that any non-psychopath will find morally repugnant, most Americans still aggressively defend the animal agriculture industry, unlike say, the oil industry. Even the most progressive and rational thinkers will become very emotional when they think their food choices are being questioned—they appear to undergo an instantaneous lobotomy and suddenly they’re fountains of nonsense about lions, cavemen, and protein deficiency.
  
  McKenna is the rare omnivore who is willing to look these issues in the face, and concede that both industry and individual consumers will have to make some changes. While on her travels, she visits small, free-range farms in the US and France, and contrasts the vivid differences in the way these farms operate and the way in which over 99% of American “meat” chickens are raised. Even as she praises these free-range producers and their products, she acknowledges how difficult is to actually find a farm like this:
  
  In 1950, there were 1.6 million poultry farms in America, most of them still independent; 50 years down the road, 98 percent of them would vanish. Today, there are about 25,000 US farms raising poultry, almost all operating under contracts with the integrators that survived consolidation…
  
  For example, the number of birds the French farm she visited produced in an entire year “could be tucked into a corner of an average American poultry property, with thousands of square feet to spare.”
  
  Clearly, Americans cannot eat the eight billion or so chickens they consume every year being supplied by free-range model. McKenna also discusses some of the changes certain factory farms are making, usually after negotiations with animal welfare and consumer safety groups. Some companies are adding a few basic welfare measures in for the chickens, such as allowing natural sunlight to enter their sheds. Other producers have vowed to go antibiotic free, and certain food chains have got an advertising boost announcing they plan to serve antibiotic-free chicken. The author sees this as an encouraging step.
  
  “No antibiotics” means different things to different companies. For some, it’s no antibiotics after a certain point in a chick’s short life, for others, it’s avoiding certain types of antibiotics, and for still others, it is indeed no antibiotics at all. Companies who take this step do take the risk of being called out by the various producers’ groups that still defend the antibiotic-use model. Trade groups assail individual companies, such as restaurant chains, that choose to go antibiotic free. There is still a lot of pressure and lobbying to stick to this damaging way of doing things.
  
  While the author seems to think a combination of free-range and more responsible intensive farming is the only future for meat production in America, she ignores certain important developments and crucial issues. First off, more responsible farming costs more. Americans, millions of whom are already struggling, will have to absorb these costs. Not everyone can afford to visit boutique farms and buy heritage-breed hens, as is depicted in the pages of this book.
  
  The experiments in “clean meat,” grown in the lab, is one of the most hopeful developments of our time. However, while lab-grown meat is still a thing of the future, plant-protein meats presently are sold in nearly every grocery and big-box store. The quality of these products has grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where
  they can (and do) fool omnivores. While products such as Beyond Meat may not replace chicken in every situation, it blends seamlessly into meals such as stir fry, curries, and fajitas that call for chicken breast strips. And although they may cost more than heavily-subsidized lower grade meats, vegan meats are still cheaper and easier to find than free range animal products. If more Americans switched to products like Beyond Meat chicken strips, even just some of the time, that would translate into fewer animals being crammed into the factory farms that do so much harm to us all.
• 
  Lacy

  If you're curious about what goes into the food we eat, I would recommend you take a look at this book. In very understandable terms, the author describes antibiotic resistance and its harm to animals and humans.
• 
  Holly

  An important book that many people should read and despite the title it's about more than just industrially-raised chickens: it could almost stand as a companion to Miracle Cure, William Rosen's comprehensive recent history of the invention of antibiotics. McKenna's book is about the entire system of industrially-raised food and its effects on our health and environment, including and in particular, antibiotic resistance. I couldn't define a plasmid before I read this - (Wikipedia: a genetic structure in a cell that can replicate independently of the chromosomes, typically a small circular DNA strand in the cytoplasm of a bacterium or protozoan), nor did I know the nearly magical way plasmids can carry antibiotic resistance across farms. So I found this book appalling - not in a graphic way such as when watching an exposé about factory farm horrors, but in what it reveals about the extent of and abuse of antibiotic use, for growth and disease, in agriculture.
  
  I don't eat meat at all, but that makes no difference if I am dire need of an antibiotic that is no longer effective. This subject is of life and death for every human (and the other creatures) on the earth.
• 
  Jeremy

  Fascinating, diving deep into the history of industrial chicken farming, and ranging widely over the state of the art and the cutting edge of antibiotic free intensive poultry raising. It was certainly scary and weird in places, but I was surprised at the hopeful note it ended on.
• 
  Jonathan Karmel

  Bacteria are constantly evolving to develop resistance to antibiotics. Antimicrobial resistance is a huge public health problem, because a growing number of people are getting diseases that cannot be cured by standard antibiotics such as penicillin. Maryn McKenna is sounding the alarm that there may come a time when antibiotics don’t work anymore.
  
  This book tells the story of “Big Chicken,” how chicken meat has become a factory farm product since World War II. One of the ways farmers have been able to cut costs and increase output of chicken meat is to put antibiotics in the food of all of their chickens. The widespread use of over-the-counter feed antibiotics to increase production in agriculture is one of the causes of antimicrobial resistance in bacteria that cause deadly diseases in humans.
  
  This problem is beginning to be addressed, no doubt in part because of the work of journalists such as the author of this book. The Animal Drug User Fee Act of 2003 (amended in 2008 and 2013), among other things, requires agribusiness to disclose the antibiotics that are being used. USDA National Organic Standards since 2002 make it possible for consumers to know whether meat is organic (and therefore mostly antibiotic-free).
  
  In 2016, the FDA established a regulation to address antimicrobial resistance by promoting “judicious use” in agriculture of antibiotics that are also used to treat diseases in humans. 81 Fed. Reg. 57796 (August 24, 2016). Consistent with Guidance for Industry (GFI) #209 and GFI #213 (published in 2013), the drug companies changed the antibiotics that are medically important for humans to veterinary prescription (Rx) status or veterinary feed directive (VFD) status, meaning these antibiotics are not supposed to be fed to animals without a prescription from a veterinarian. Rx status means the drug is only supposed to be prescribed to treat a sick animal, and VFD status means a veterinarian is only supposed to write an order to put the drug in the food of a group of animals when there has been a disease outbreak. This is a change from the prior practice where farmers bought antibiotics that are prescribed to humans over-the-counter and fed them to all of their animals just to make them grow faster with less expensive feed. Antibiotics that are not used for humans can still be purchased over-the-counter and put in the food of all of the animals.
  
  Attention to this issue has also caused the big chicken producers, starting with Purdue, and the big chicken sellers such as McDonalds, Walmart and Chick-fil-A, to move in the direction of marketing their chicken as antibiotic-free. There is also a growing market for old-fashioned free-range, organic chicken sold in stores such as Whole Foods to consumers who are willing and able to pay twice as much for a more natural, gamier type of chicken.
  
  I did not think this book presented the information very objectively or in a well-organized way. It seemed like the author was trying to shock people into believing that there was some huge problem with the food supply, a little bit like the famous muckraker Upton Sinclair. The book gives the impression that there is a big threat of contracting antibiotic-resistant Salmonella from eating chicken bought in a typical supermarket. But is this really a big risk if you wash surfaces and hands that come into contact with raw meat and avoid eating raw eggs and undercooked meat? Also, it’s a bit Pollyannaish to believe that the U.S. government is going to require, or even subsidize, chicken farming to be done the way it is done under France’s Label Rouge program.
  
  I was happy to learn that one of the leaders in the United States on the issue of antibiotic resistance is a member of Congress representing New York, Louise Slaughter. It’s good to know there are still some people in Washington on the side of science. This book clearly shows the danger of allowing big business to influence government agencies such as the FDA.
• 
  Sara

  I have to admit that sometimes I get conscious consumer fatigue and just buy cheap food at the discount grocery. We're all going to die eventually (though it often seems more imminent these days) so what's the difference between a $1.69 chicken breast family pack and the air chilled locally raised butchered on site chicken at $5.99 from the butcher shop? But then I read books like this and have to remind myself, it's not just what I'm eating, it's supply and demand, supporting causes with my money as well as my tweets. Although, to be honest, reading books like this also make me hate capitalism and lobbyists and science-deniers and the fact that money and profit drive everything.
• 
  Alex Linschoten

  This book is all about how industrial farming's use of antibiotics is causing resistant strains to emerge for humans. McKenna has to cover a large swathe of material, and this book is engagingly written with a mix of personal stories and investigation. Two points of detraction: the unblinking focus on the USA (barring a couple of excursions to the UK and the Netherlands) gets a bit boring. Why do we have to always read about the practices of the American government & their industry? Secondly, trying to end on a happy note: this might also be an American thing, but I'm not sure whether it was really appropriate given the subject matter or even an appropriate conclusion to have drawn from the material. An other warning, too: read this book and you may not want to eat chicken ever again...
• 
  honeybean

  Phenomenal read. Discussed how large quantity of chicken meat became essential to American eating lifestyle, how the meat became dangerous due to the infiltration of antibiotics into our livestock, and how chicken overall has changed and the confinement is affecting our diets. Highly recommend
• 
  Laurel

  Wow, this book is terrifying. It took me some time to get through it because of the nature of the subject matter. I highly suggest all people who consume a Western diet read this.
• 
  Melissa

  I would describe this book as horrifying - another example of how safety regulations are written in blood, and why it's unreasonable to expect industries to self-regulate in the face of enormous financial pressure. It was reassuring at the end to learn that there have been some improvements in the use of antibiotics, but there's still a very long way to go to ensure that we still have antibiotics available to treat people as bacteria that cause illnesses continue to develop resistance to more and more types of antibiotics.
  
  Big Chicken was informative and covered a lot of history that's necessary to understand the current situation. The author did a great job of explaining the many factors that affect(ed) the use of antibiotics in raising chickens and the development of the chicken industry as a whole in an interesting way, which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write. There's a mix of interviews, archival research, and other sources. It does get a little slow in places, but overall it's a good read and I feel much more educated (and again, horrified) as a consumer.
• 
  Elizabeth

  Absolutely terrifying. Humanity is in a race to end it all...will it be resistant bacteria? Nuclear war or climate change? 😖☠️ Like all other things, antibiotics and farming is all money and big corporations who don’t care about people, they only care about making money as cheaply as possible and their bottom lines. We’re all doomed.
• 
  Ondra

  Chickens + infectious disease = one of my favorite books this year. Definitely worth a read, even if neither of those topics are your thing. It's fascinating, informative, and frightening.
• 
  Alise

  I kind of wish I hadn't read this. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
• 
  Elizabeth

  Very good. Though long, don't let that scare you off. Not dry or boring. It is info you will want to know for your own good.
• 
  Jodie

  Well researched book on the origins of the poultry industry as we know it today and the impact of certain agricultural practices on human health. I look forward to reading anything this author puts out in the future. Journalism at its best.
• 
  Jasmine

  I like antibiotic free chicken and I cannot lie
• 
  Nat

  A thorough read on how antibiotics use in chicken has lead to the surge in microbial resistance to drugs. This book is written in a way to put in complex medical terms into non-patronising lay-man terms. I hope it becomes such a hit that like "the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks". It is not complete doom as corporations as farmers and corporations are starting to phase out antibiotic practice and there is a list of course of actions consumers can take. All in all great informative read.
• 
  Beth Ann

  Maryn McKenna has written an excellent book about the how the use of antibiotics in raising farm animals is directly assisting in the creation of drug resistance bacteria. She points out that new antibiotics are becoming too expensive to research and bring to market because bacteria become almost immediately resistant to the new drug before the company can recoup the cost of development. The CDC director is quoted that a post-antibiotic era is upon us and for some patients who have a drug resistant illness, it is already here. A scary thought for those who have studied medical history.
  
  The books starts with the discovery of antibiotics and their immediate use on the farm as growth promoters and preventives for possible disease in crowded chicken houses. It did not take long before antibiotic resistance was noted but it took much effort, money and sleuthing to prove the cause and effect of antibiotic use on the farm and antibiotic resistant illness in the population. Painstakingly over time the evidence overwhelmingly points to a correlation.
  
  The conclusion of the book focuses on how good farming practices can allow for the withdraw of antibiotics except in cases of actual illness in an animal. This is partly due to the fact that antibiotics are no longer providing the growth results that they once did. Ms McKenna gives many examples of large corporations and farmers who are dedicating themselves to phasing out the routine use of antibiotics. It gives a ray of hope that we may avoid the day when antibiotics fail.
• 
  Emma

  I’m a vegetarian and a veterinary student. I also spent some time in Delmarva learning it’s poultry history and the nuances that go into poultry farming. I loved the book for its historical accuracy but the bias framing made it difficult for me to rate this better. Although accurate the omission of information from one side or the other prevents readers from critically analyzing the complexity of the issue.
  
  One very clear example of this is on page 268.
  The author argues “Vaccines are a more efficient protection against infection than antibiotics. If you administer them once, the immune system is forever primed to fight - but antibiotics must be given each time infections start, or continuously to prevent them beginning.”
  
  First of all I want to address the fact that vaccines don’t always offer life long protection or immunity. Vaccination efficacy varies. Vaccine reactions do occur in poultry and can cause high mortalities due to the development of the disease in which it was suppose to protect against. Those that survive will become protected. Some may overcome the primary disease but be die from secondary bacterial infections.
  
  While the author was making an argument for an alternative she never mentioned the implications of the alternative and how it compares. For reasons like this I say that I loved the book but you must think of it critically, be aware of one sided information and framing of the subject.
• 
  Rachel Blakeman

  The subtitle should really be "We're F*cked." I have been interested in understanding antibiotic resistance for years but this was my first deep dive into agricultural antibiotic use. And this book fundamentally changed how I think about my chicken consumption habits. If you like books that look at our food supply, this should definitely be on your reading list.
  
  This books reads quickly in a nice, narrative way. I saw other reviewers thought it was repetitive. I disagree. There were references to earlier chapters but it was to draw comparisons.
  
  I will also say this is another solid book from National Geographic Publishing. It is a solid publisher but their books receive very little attention. I hope that changes so the readers don't have to do the heavy lifting of finding the titles and recommending them.
• 
  Lauren Schumacher

  I don't really know how to rate a book like this. The research seemed thorough and reliable, and the science was imparted clearly. But I didn't like...enjoy reading it...? It was research for me.
  
  That said, highly interesting. The tl;dr version is: agricultural uses of antibiotics are completely unsustainable. They were a true miracle drug, and offered an incredible short-term boost to global meat availability. But we just can't make new ones as quickly as bacteria can adapt. Both human health and animal welfare is compromised by casual use of agricultural antibiotics.
  
  The more I learn about food and agriculture, the less meat I eat. I'm okay with that.
• 
  Nazrul Buang

  Just finished reading 'Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats' (2017) by Maryn McKenna. I decided to borrow a copy to understand how the unscrupulous and excessive use of antibiotics in the poultry industry contribute to the epidemic rise in antibiotics resistance.
  
  'Big Chicken' is a textbook example of riveting investigative journalism, where author McKenna tries to comprehensively identify the various factors and circumstances in the history of the poultry industry that eventually led to unprecedented resistance to antibiotics, causing the scientific community to warn about an imminent medical crisis, as well as the effects of overbreeding towards the environment as a result of excessive antibiotic administration. It paints a near-apocalyptic portrayal of a future to highlight the sheer gravity of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (MRSA), and the dire need to fix this crisis before it's too late.
  
  It is also a classic case of exploring and exposing the dark side of capitalism, of how an industry's drive to meet market demand spur the need to increase supply by multiple folds. At the same time, this circumstantially coincided with the post-WWII timing, where new antibiotics were discovered and the desperate need for food supply for warfare and deterrence against disasters towards food crops further buttressed and warranted the use of antibiotics on poultry. As amazing as it sounds, it highlights the fascinating notion raised by historians of how scientific discoveries are spurred not by innovation, but actually by wars.
  
  This exploration into the poultry industry is a exemplary case of understanding causality. Running in the same vein as Kate Moore's 'Radium Girls', the book's main objective is to play detective and trace back how their respective problems came to be, emphasizing the sheer difficulty and complexity of connecting the dots and pinpointing the true cause of the outbreak of salmonella and E. coli, and identifying exhaustively the subtle patterns in the string of seemingly unrelated cases. The only main difference is, the main characters in Moore's book are the girls themselves whereas the main characters in McKenna's are the two bacteria, salmonella and E. coli.
  
  Instead of identifying and concluding just how dangerous MRSA are and how the poultry industry has to be reformed, McKenna also offers a solution that can help curb the outbreak as illustrated through case studies of selected farms in France and the Netherlands. It involves a complete change in the poultry industry and perhaps even the country's economy, where the interests of each group must be respected and redefined in order to prevent future outbreaks.
  
  The author carefully balances pessimistic prudence of the virulence of MRSA, with optimistic hopefulness towards consumers' rising awareness towards the dangers of MRSA and their changing consumption habits; analyzes how the industry tries to improve the situation by exploring the challenges faced by 'anti-antibiotic' farmers in ensuring a sustainable antibiotic-free environment for their animals.
  
  The threat of the rise of MRSA is real and terrifying, yet there is hope that this danger can be put under control. This is a great medical-scientific book to understand the world of antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the very daily meat we eat everyday, and how the complexity of the modern world can worsen a problem if it continues to go unchecked. I thank author McKenna for the fascinating read; her book makes me look at chicken in a different light and understand and appreciate how goes into raising chickens and how to be a better informed consumer.
• 
  Macayla Fryc

  This well-researched documentation of the global discovery and introduction of antibiotics to our food and medical systems is fascinating. Goes way beyond the grasp of "big chicken."
  
  1940s saw the launch of the antibiotic "rush" and the carelessness with which the FDA threw antibiotics into food production. This alone allowed farmers to crowd more animals into smaller spaces, feed them worse food, and care for them less. Chickens were fed antibiotics, were soaked in antibiotics, and final products were painted with antibiotics.
  
  Cue the epidemics.
  
  1960s was the discovery of plasmids, which are transferrable immunity between bacteria. Bacteria could be resistant to a whole host of drugs they'd never been exposed to before. Pharmaceutical companies refuted all negativity toward animal antibiotics.
  
  Cue worse epidemics.
  
  1970s-90s Study after study. Resistance had gotten so out of hand that hundreds of thousands were getting sick, and scientists had discovered bacteria that were resistant to the very last weapon we have against them.
  
  Cue the realistic threat of antibiotic apocalypse.
  
  "Resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the U.S., 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond these deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses - two million annually just in the United States - and cost billions in health care spending, lost wages, and lost national productivity. It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100 trillion and will cause a staggering 10 million deaths per year.”
  
  Due to the intense carelessness of the FDA, it wasn't until 2001 (60 years later!!) that they actually conducted a survey of how many drugs were being pumped into our meat. Human medicine was 3 million pounds, agriculture was 24.6 million. Currently, 80% of the antibiotics sold in the United states and more than half of those sold around the world are used in animals, not humans.
  
  “If we want to be serious about having some medicine left over for our children, then we should do something about antibiotic use in our farms." - Oosterlaken
• 
  Tanya

  This is one of the best books I've read in some time. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in where our food comes from, human health, animal welfare, antibiotic resistance, and history. The emergence of chicken as a dominant protein source in Western diets, and the related use of antibiotics in industrial livestock have had a number of economic, social, and infectious-disease related outcomes, and Maryn McKenna deftly intertwines history, scientific evidence, and glimpses into individual human stories to highlight the issues of antibiotic use in the poultry industry, and how they arose.
  
  McKenna writes so well ... this book is incredibly interesting, and easy to read! It's clearly well-researched, which will not surprise readers of her previous books (and articles), and she manages to explain the science in such a way that non-experts will understand (but won't be dull for experts). She is adept at highlighting the risks and dangers associated with antibiotic resistance, without descending into unmitigated panic. I was particularly impressed with her respect and evenhanded treatment of individuals (historical and current) who are portrayed in the book, even in cases where decisions/actions have led to some detrimental consequences..
  
  I teach university microbiology, and am thinking of ways of incorporating this book into one of my courses, as it integrates so many key aspects of microbiology in such a relevant context. This is also going to make me put a bit more thought into my meat shopping/menu choices in future!