Benign enchiladas.

• Author: Cabot, Tyler

IN THE PROLOGUE TO KATHLEEN Hart's Eating in the Dark, Grace Booth is attacked by an enchilada. She runs a home for troubled youth, and prepares her residents enchiladas for lunch. Within minutes, her lips swell, and her head and back itch uncontrollably. Her throat swells shut. She tries calling for help, but "her voice would not come out"--altogether, a scene out of ER. Hart writes, "She was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, where she went into anaphylactic shock and almost died"

Booth was only one of scores of Americans who complained of allergic reactions to corn products during the summer and fall of 2000, when news broke that traces of genetically engineered StarLink corn had found their way onto grocery store shelves.

But conspicuously absent from Hart's terrifying introduction are several important details that seriously undermine her credibility. To begin with, most people who rushed to the Food and Drug Administration with corn horror stories (including Booth) did so only after public hysteria had been raised to a fever pitch from non-stop media coverage. More significantly, Hart fails to mention that a sample of the corn tortillas Booth had eaten turned up negative for the StarLink protein, to which a subsequent allergy test showed that she was not even allergic. Her tests were among 11 food samples and 17 blood samples sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for study after the story broke.

After months of research, the CDC could find absolutely no evidence that Booth (or any of the other supposed victims who underwent testing) had suffered an allergic reaction. She may have gotten sick after eating corn tortillas, but it wasn't StarLink that nearly killed her. Yet Hart buries these telling studies 200-odd pages into the text--a pretermission symptomatic of her entire "unbiased" work.

The American food supply is inundated with genetically engineered food, and it is Hart's intention to make us fear it. Her central contention is that the public has been kept largely ignorant of the dangers of bioengineered food and its prevalence in the food supply. Indeed, Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans, modified to endure a thorough dousing of the weed killer Roundup, accounted for 60 percent of the soy harvest last year. (Soy is an ingredient in two-thirds of all processed foods.) Bt Corn, engineered with its own pesticide in every kernel, accounts for a quarter of the U.S. harvest. Yet two-thirds of Americans in...