Over the past decade, there has been an increasing number of food alerts—bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), dioxin, Listeria, Salmonella—creating a genuine crisis of confidence among consumers in food safety and its governance. Of these food alerts, the BSE one has been the worst, developing the characters of a real emergency.

van Zwanenberg and Millstone’s book BSE: risk, science and governance provides a comprehensive analysis of the development of the BSE crisis, tracing its roots back to traditional UK agriculture and food policy-making. From these premises, the book analyses the course of events from the discovery of the first …