“I hope this book will make you feel that it’s time to throw unsafe food out the window.”

So writes Wu Heng, the founder of Throw it Out the Window (www.zccw.info), a website staffed by volunteers that documents China’s rampant food safety problem and tallies incidents of unsafe food — 3,449 since 2004. In July, Mr. Wu, 28, a former history student and now a journalist who lives in Shanghai, published a book by the same title aiming to raise awareness of a problem he says is fueled by greed, ignorance and corruption, and to support consumer rights.

The book’s table of contents vividly illustrates the problem. Resembling a periodic table of elements, it points the reader to chapters dealing with an unsafe food, a chemical or a policy problem. They include melamine milk and leather milk, fake beef and fake lamb, malachite fish and heavy metal fish, garbage pigs, gutter oil, bleach mushrooms and sulfuric acid lychees, institutional overlaps, policy gaps and special interests.

Finally, it shows Mr. Wu’s prescription for how people can protect themselves, to a certain degree. He calls this the “Three RPs Principle”: Right Price, Right Place and Rotate Poisons.