Food and Crime

Food and Crime looks at how theft, fraud, and organized crime dwell at every level of the food world.

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Anyone alive, and wanting to stay that way, must deal with food. Crime is, and always has been, present. Food and Crime examines the crossroads of these two universal forces, how hunger can lead to theft, fraud, and murder, and how the well-fed will sometimes do anything to keep their bellies full. From the one-timers to the career caper-planners, food criminals are a wide-ranging, often audacious bunch, and this is the record of their impact, great and small.

From a war fought by the Mayor of New York over tasty thistles, to the role McDonald's plays in the American culinary conscious, to how foreign food aid abuse led to a mighty fall in the financial sector, these sixteen stories of criminals who engage with the world of cuisine, cookery, or agriculture cover food and crime from the piddliest pilfering to the most diabolical murders. Covering the period from the Ancient Greeks (who invented insurance fraud) to the effects of COVID-19 on seafood crime in the true crime capital of America - Florida, here's clear evidence that there's never been a time when food and crime were not intimately entangled. Food and Crime sheds light on the unexpected, and sometimes unbelievable, connections between two things that we can never seem to get enough of.