"Chicken, corn, potatoes, a slice of bread, and a glass of milk: these are all ingredients of a typical meal, eaten by millions of people every day. Eaten usually without much thought given to where this food comes from, and at what cost. Who and what is involved in growing it and getting it to your table? Most Canadians don't know. In fact, many of us still nurse images of family farms that grow a variety of crops and animals -- and will be shocked to learn how far from the norm that now is. In Secret Ingredients, Stuart Laidlaw paints a devastating portrait of modern farming practices, and of what they are doing to our food and to farmers. In increasing numbers, once-independent farmers now work on contract for huge food corporations. Many farmers, skilled at growing a variety of crops, now grow a single genetically modified food in soil saturated with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This is industrial farming, the same concept that brings us hog farms with more inhabitants than a small town -- and no sewage system. Today, so much money is at stake that agriculture policy is now shaped by world trade regulations that favour multinational corporations. Laidlaw uncovers many shocking practices, from pesticide use so severe it causes massive fish kills in P.E.I. rivers to the transformation of small prairie abattoirs into vast slaughterhouses dependent on minimum-wage immigrant workers. Secret Ingredients brings a whole new dimension to the age-old question of what to have for dinner. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.