Toxins in the Food Chain

PERCEPTION
I’ll start with an old cliché. If you throw a frog in boiling water, it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, the frog won’t realize its demise and it will die. This also called creeping normalcy which has been attributed to a basic fundamental flaw in human perception. Changes in the environment, which occur at or below a certain rate, will be ignored by most people.

By the early 1960’s the use of industrial pesticides were so heavily used that an avid bird watcher named Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring that was inspired by her notice of declining bird populations. Were it not for the seasonal changes, this decline may never have been recognized. During the Vietnam War, the public became aware of the Agent Orange defoliant, and together with Carson’s book, a movement was formed that finally culminated in the creation of Environmental Protection Agency in December, 1970. The period in between was tumultuous with debates, accusations and predictions. “U Thant of the United Nations gave the planet only ten years to avert environmental disaster; the following month, he blamed the bulk of planetary catastrophe on the United States.”.(Lewis 1985 para. 8)

The 1960’s and 1970’s was a period of environmental awakening. Asbestos was linked to lung diseases and its use was banned from textiles, particularly children’s pajamas and DDT was linked to the thinning of bird egg shells. A myriad of other environmental issues entered public awareness and gave birth to “Earth Day.” It also was the beginning of the Industrial Global Migration which emptied the steel mills of Indiana and Pennsylvania, and continues to this day, to close domestic manufacturing plants as high-paid American workers who work in clean, safe environments are shed and replaced with low wage workers in developing countries where there is no safety or environmental regulation.