As I understand it, the fears around using plastics for food is an urban legend and scientific review of DEHA, etc., has shown that the levels of the chemicals that might be consumed after the plastics touch food are well under the threshhold of toxic effect. There's a lot of faith-based propoganda that "all chemicals are poisons!" and so forth being spread, but the scientific evidence shows otherwise.
Head-in-the-sandism is a bad thing (and not in any way that I can see at all a particularly American problem), but we have to make as sure as we can that we are reacting to legitimate fears and dangers. "Freak out now and ask questions later" is not necessarily a better approach to take, given that freaking out carries its own costs.
My belief is that rather than hearing about "many fewer things than are really problems," we tend to have the opposite signal-to-noise problem.
I didn't quite follow your comment regarding 9/11. It's true that the average American was "shocked" by this event and had previously very little clue as to who Osama bin Laden even was (except for those who remembered the embassy bombings, the Cole, etc). But the average American doesn't know a lot of stuff, often out of rational ignorance. (To the average American, being up to speed on Al-Qaeda on Sept 10, 2001, would be of jack-all use.) He was certainly on the US government's radar screen, however.
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ninetydegrees
Urban legend
on 2006-09-28 02:53 pm (UTC)As I understand it, the fears around using plastics for food is an urban legend and scientific review of DEHA, etc., has shown that the levels of the chemicals that might be consumed after the plastics touch food are well under the threshhold of toxic effect. There's a lot of faith-based propoganda that "all chemicals are poisons!" and so forth being spread, but the scientific evidence shows otherwise.
Head-in-the-sandism is a bad thing (and not in any way that I can see at all a particularly American problem), but we have to make as sure as we can that we are reacting to legitimate fears and dangers. "Freak out now and ask questions later" is not necessarily a better approach to take, given that freaking out carries its own costs.
My belief is that rather than hearing about "many fewer things than are really problems," we tend to have the opposite signal-to-noise problem.
I didn't quite follow your comment regarding 9/11. It's true that the average American was "shocked" by this event and had previously very little clue as to who Osama bin Laden even was (except for those who remembered the embassy bombings, the Cole, etc). But the average American doesn't know a lot of stuff, often out of rational ignorance. (To the average American, being up to speed on Al-Qaeda on Sept 10, 2001, would be of jack-all use.) He was certainly on the US government's radar screen, however.