This extensively color-illustrated atlas serves as a comprehensive guide not only to persons actively involved in food quality control but also to students and trainees, as well as to nontechnical food in-dustry personnel who wish to enhance their product knowledge. Each chapter is devoted to a commodity group (e.g., fresh meats) with two non-commodity chapters concerned with precepts of food quality control and foreign bodies and infestations. Those foods similar in nature and which could be placed in more than one chapter are cross-referenced. Extensively Illustrated Illustrations were selected based on those quality defects most commonly encountered at retail or final inspection level, together with less common defects which illustrate a point of particular signif-icance. Rare cases of actual spoilage or visible quality dete-rioration of some shelf-stable products are provided to serve as a reference point. Particular attention in this respect is paid to "exotic" imported goods such as Oriental fermented products, the nature of which may be unfamiliar to many persons involved in food inspection. Covers Technical Aspects of Quality Control The atlas is primarily concerned with the technical aspects of qual-ity control. The visual faults illustrated are related to the manufac-turing technology involved, where possible, in order to identify their cause. In addition, examples of laboratory tests which may be of value in confirming visual diagnoses are included. Food poisoning agents (microbial or chemical in nature) which cannot usually be de-tected by visual examination and specific problems of a public health nature are also discussed.