The vitamin murders

"Dashing out of the maternity hospital clutching his first-born tight, James Fergusson felt that universal paternal urge to protect his child from the world. But he and his wife Melissa, a restaurant adviser, already knew too much about the chemical contamination of our food supply to be optimistic. The average adult in this country has a cocktail of at least 300 man-made chemicals sloshing inside them, often in potentially dangerous doses, and barely any of these chemicals even existed a couple of generations ago." "James discovers that back during World War Two, the besieged Britons ate better, nutritionally, than ever they had before or since. And one man was responsible for keeping the country fit to fight the Nazis: Sir Jack Drummond, Churchill's Chief Food Scientist - a hero in his time, and someone who, had he not been brutally and mysteriously murdered in rural France in 1952, might have been able to prevent the nation's steady march toward a buffet of obesity, allergies and heart disease. Could the man who named vitamin A and vitamin B have saved the UK's food? Might James's daughter have had a less contaminated start in life? Curious as much about the career and legacy of the remarkable Drummond as about his own family's chemical consumption, James Fergusson set off for la France profonde to find out what we have lost."--BOOK JACKET.