I made muffins two days in a row last month. So what, you say? So that means l exposed my family twice to the dangers of EDB without being aware of it. In fact, we had just finished the second batch of muffins when the announcement came on the news about EDB, and what do you think accompanied the warning about this latest health hazard we have to worry about? The announcement was coupled with a picture of muffins! If the EDB wasn't going to kill us, the shock was . So now they're thinking of taking most of the cake mixes off the shelf. And what about other forms of grain? What about flour? What about cereals? What about bread? Where does it end? And where were these harbingers of bad news when the pesticide was allowed for use in the first place? Sometimes I wonder about the system we have of checks and balances. We always find out about the dangers of certain chemicals after it's too late to do anything about it. Remember the cranberry scare some years back? It was right around holiday time and everyone was warned not to eat canned cranberries. So my father went out and bought fresh cranberries and splattered the whole kitchen with popping cranberries. Then, all of a sudden, the danger was not a topic of conversation anymore and everyone went back to eating canned cranberries, and as far as I know, no one seems to be the worse for it. - And how about the saccharin scare? And the nitrates and nitrites? Of course, cigarette warnings have been with us for a long time and they seem legitimate, but I see one of the major tobacco companies is starting a campaign of rebuttal against the findings of the Surgeon General. So where does it all leave us, the innocent but vulnerable public? If stress is the biggest killer of them all, then what's really going to do us in is listening to all these warnings and trying to figure out what's going to be hazardous for us next, How do we develop foresight instead of hindsight? And if they take all the food items off the shelves, what do we do then? Starve? Living in a modern technology is wonderful—we have so much more than our fore bearers had, but with new technology comes new problems and it seems we have to develop a new technique for survival. (I told you we only exchange one kind of problem for another). - I guess the answer is moderation. When they give us warnings of any kind, it's usually accompanied by statistics that show a rat or some other laboratory animal was subjected to dosages most humans wouldn't live long enough to ingest, and it does make me wonder who's behind all these get-it off-the-shelf shenanigans. Is somebody out there really concerned about our well-being or is it a vendetta of some kind to ruin certain businesses? Will we ever really know? EDB, PCB, DDT, QRST... watch out for the alphabet —it could be hazardous to your health !
- *Terri the Typesetter
*T-Views Week Of February 19, 1984
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