WHEN cows began dying in Sweden in 1997, nobody could have predicted that it would lead to one of the biggest food scares in recent history. The animals had been poisoned when they drank from a stream contaminated with acrylamide, the base chemical for an industrial polymer.
No surprise, then, that there was uproar in 2002 when Swedish scientists announced that this same substance was everywhere in food, from potato chips to bread, breakfast cereals, biscuits and coffee. No one knew how it got there, how much of it we were all consuming, what risk it posed to health or…
