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“The powerful consumer is just another product”: Big Farms Make Big Flu reviewed in Counterfire

Big Farms Make Big Flu

Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science

400 pp, $24 pbk, ISBN: 9781583675892
By Rob Wallace

Reviewed by Elaine Graham-Leigh

“During the nineteenth century, three US presidents died in office, or shortly after it, from drinking the water in the White House. This was probably because that water was drawn downstream from the marsh where the White House’s ‘nightsoil’ was dumped, including that of the slaves who helped build it. For Rob Wallace, this is therefore an ‘epiphenomenon of empire’, as ‘on what was a glorified plantation, growing not crops but imperial designs alienated from people and places alike, enslaved men and women were obligated to kill their masters bucket by bucket’….”

Read the review in Counterfire

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