Readers Digest.(Food, Inc.)(Eating in the Dark)(Book Review)

In 1998, just as the battle over genetically modified food was heating up, the Monsanto C.E.O. Robert Shapiro--one of the men who represented O. J. Simpson--was struck in the face by a tofu cream pie hurled by enraged eco-protesters in San Francisco. Shapiro has moved on from Monsanto, the chemical giant that created Agent Orange and that, since the nineteen-eighties, has become a powerhouse in transgenic crop technology--the practice of inserting foreign genes (from, say, fireflies or chicken) into corn, potatoes, and rice. In Food, Inc. (Simon & Schuster), the veteran reporter Peter Pringle offers a refreshingly measured look at this brave new world of "gene guns," Flavr Savr tomatoes, contaminated taco shells, lax regulatory oversight, dwindling crop diversity, rapacious "biopirates," and geneticists toiling in grenade-proof greenhouses ...