Book Reviews

Uncertain Peril

by Claire Hope Cummings
Beacon Press, 2008

$24.95, 232 pages

If I told you that deep in an arctic mountainside a "Doomsday Vault" is being built to safely store nearly three million seeds taken from virtually every known food crop in the world, you might wonder when Stanley Kubrick made a sequel to Dr. Strangelove (and if it's available on NetFlix). Regrettably, this noble endeavor is a real response to the perils of living with an increasingly industrialized agriculture industry. Industrial agriculture corporations, subject to rubber-stamp regulation by the U.S. government, are racing to patent seeds and solidify their control of food at every level, from the soil to the plate. Meanwhile, we, the taxpayers, are (unwittingly) spending billions to fund the placement of genetically modified foods on the shelves. It all amounts to an experiment to which we didn't consent, with consequences we can't fully predict. Uncertain Peril examines how this corporate quest for intellectual property will shape the fate of our seeds and our world. It's an engaging read, but the whole situation leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. --Sam Edmondson

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