Secret Ingredients: The Brave New World of Industrial Farming

by Stuart Laidlaw

You are what you eat, but do you know what is in the food you’re eating – or how it’s grown?

Chicken, corn, potatoes, a slice of bread, and a glass of milk. Where does a meal like this come from? Who and what is involved in getting it to your table? Most Canadians don’t know – and will be shocked to find out that, while we were snacking, farming has been transformed. Today, once-independent farmers work on contract for huge food corporations, growing genetically modified food in soil saturated with chemicals. Farming is big business and has become a matter of world trade regulations that favour global corporations. Laidlaw, in investigating the state of modern farming, uncovers many shocking practices, from pesticide use so severe it causes massive fish kills in PEI rivers to the transformation of small prairie abattoirs into vast, industrial slaughterhouses dependent on minimum-wage immigrant workers. Secret Ingredients brings a whole new dimension to the age-old question of what to have for dinner tonight.

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2003

Reviews

[Lily F · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was my first real introduction to the world of industrial farming, and I would say it’s a fairly informative guide, speaking from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know much about the industry. The one criticism I have for it, and it is not the books fault, is that it is almost 20 years old so some of the information is slightly out of date. As a Canadian, I found it really nice to read a book written from the perspective of a Canadian farming expert. It definitely made me think about where my food comes from, and laid out the complicated, multilayered problem with industrial farming, proving that there is not a simple solution for a better system for food production.