The Informant

Since I’m in the midst of flinging around a bunch of familiar knitting projects, and still planning out the next ones, I thought this would be a good time for another book report!

I had this one for a while before reading it fairly recently – The Informant, by Kurt Eichenwald.  This true story is a bit dated – the book was published in 2000 and evidently there was a movie in 2009 – but it’s still a fascinating and relevant read.  Eichenwald began his career as a journalist with the New York Times, and has since written, among other things, Conspiracy of Fools (about the shenanigans at Enron - another excellent book!).

The main character in The Informant is a scientist-turned-business-executive, Mark Whitacre, who spends most of the book interacting closely with a small group of FBI agents in order to reveal inappropriate collusion and price fixing between large-scale food additives manufacturers.  Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is at the center of these events, and is where Whitacre works.

This is a long story – the book is 566 pages not including the extensive endnotes – and it starts out as your typical story of greed and misaligned incentives that so often occur in big business.   You’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about lysine and the use of specialized bacteria to produce these kinds of food additives (I’ll reserve any comments related to GMO but expect that these details are beyond the reach of that hype).

What I didn’t expect was the fascinating and detailed analysis of Whitacre’s behavior, which was often times unpredictable verging on the bizarre.  I can’t say how I would have functioned in such a situation, but the degree to which Whitacre distorted and fabricated literally everything was astounding.  I won’t give away any details, because a couple of them were pretty shocking, but this was a great case study of a personality disorder as described through the subject’s words and behaviors that were directly observed and often times recorded and transcribed.  It took me a little while to realize this was happening, but from that point on I couldn’t put the book down!