Journalist Nicols Fox is the author of Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth about a Food Chain Gone Haywire (paperback title Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do about It). Spoiled focuses on food-borne diseases, such as E. coli and Salmonella, that kill almost 9,000 Americans each year.
Fox first became interested in the subject in 1993, when she read about a group of children on the west coast who had become seriously ill and, in several cases, had died, after eating hamburgers contaminated with E. coli bacteria at a local fast-food restaurant. She began researching the subject, and reached the frightening conclusion that the E. coli incident she'd read about was not an isolated incident; food, particularly meat, becomes contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens very easily because of the way the Americans mass-produce, process, and distribute food.
As a result of several years of research, Fox wrote Spoiled and became a "reluctant" vegetarian. Fox has written articles for many journals, including The Economist and the Washington Journalism Review, where she worked as an editor for many years. She lives in rural Maine.
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