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Agric Hum Values (2014) 31:165166 DOI 10.1007/s10460-014-9482-x
Martha Rosenberg: Born with a junk food deciency: how acks, quacks, and hacks pimp the public health
Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2012, 373 pp, ISBN: 978-1-61614-593-4 (cloth)
Ann E. Reisner
Accepted: 1 December 2013 / Published online: 19 January 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Born with a Junk Food Deciency is a classic muckraking expose of two major industries that directly affect what we, the public, take into our bodiesthe pharmaceutical and the agri-food industry. The author, Martha Rosenberg, is a freelance writer, editorial cartoonist and internet health columnist whose work has appeared in a variety of highly inuential and prestigious newspapers (e.g., San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) as well as in well-known websites (Hufngton Post, AlterNet, and Counterpoint).
Although the author does not have an explicit analysis of the power structure, she identiesthrough multiple examplesan interesting repetitive pattern of the important players in pharmaceutical and food products, including attention to related agricultural production. Essentially she assigns the responsibility of risky medications and agricultural additions to industry, sometimes identied as the entire sector (e.g., Parma or AgriBiz), sometimes as specic companies, and sometimes as occupational groups investors on Wall Street, marketers, scientists, doctors, medical journals, public relations and ghost writing rms, and/or the lawyers who collectively enable products to continue or to expand into public markets (p. 51).
The process of product placement and development, as described by the author, in the main follows this pattern: The marketers create markets for drugs (or genetically...