A book for those with no chemical knowlege seeking guidance through the fog of ignorance and misinformation

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Attention! If you are a would-be Dr Crippen of the organic persuasion, this book has a few tips for you. For the rest of us the author has drawn on his wide knowledge of foods and plant chemistry to help us avoid spousal homicide

The main underlying theme is to warn against the fallacy that if it's natural it must be good for you. From a plant's point of view it is not generally a good thing to be eaten by animals or to suffer wasting microbial diseases. Being unable to run away, plants have developed an enormous diversity of chemical weapons to defend themselves. The plants in which these substances occur, and how we can avoid them, are the subject of this book. Minor themes are that children are especially vulnerable and that even the most virulent poisonous constituent of a food is harmless if you need to eat 100 kg a day of the food to be harmed.

The author begins with a discussion of the omnivores dilemma: the wider our choice of foods the better we are equipped in the struggle for enough nourishment, but gobbling up everything available can lead us into trouble. So we share with rats and many other animals an instinctive fear of new food, and Dr Mann has many accounts of the hostility to such present-day staples as potatoes and tomatoes when first brought to Europe from America. The fear of genetically modified foods, though in his view largely misguided, is firmly rooted in our instinctive aversion.

The two sections of the book, entitled respectively Things We Should Worry About But Don't, and Things We Worry About But Need Not, explain how our natural cautious attitude to food can be misdirected.

The former illustrates the fearsome chemical factories that lurk in such ordinary foods as potatoes, celery, beans, alfalfa sprouts, and shellfish, and has a helpful chapter on food-borne infections. For each of these hazards, the author has advice on avoiding or minimising risk.

The latter section has some favourable things to say about preservatives, natural and artificial, and is scathing about the MSG, Chinese restaurant syndrome panic, and the unscrupulous way public ignorance can be manipulated.

The book concludes with a miscellany of Things We Ought to Know, and a list of further reading.

Those who freeze at the sight of a chemical formula or long chmical name can be reassured. The book is in simple language, with no formulae and the minimum of chemistry. A book for those with no chemical knowlege seeking guidance through the fog of ignorance and misinformation.

> Bernard Howard is emeritus professor of biochemistry at Lincoln University.