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The World's Fair

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profile.gif David Ng is Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia - this is a just a fancier way of calling himself a science teacher.

profile.gifBenjamin Cohen is an Asst. Professor of Science, Tech., and Society at the University of Virginia. He studies the place of S & T in environmental history, policy, and ethics. He also writes other stuff.

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« An Iraq Cartoon -- remember Iraq? That war? | Main | Setting Research Agendas and The 'Ounce Prevention/Pound Cure' Aphorism »

Toxins in Our Food: This Month's Alternative Sponsor at The World's Fair

Category: Ethics Palace: Where ethical questions go to live or die
Posted on: November 28, 2007 8:45 AM, by Benjamin Cohen

Our alternative sponsor for November (arriving very late in the month) is a Tom Meyer cartoon.

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(by Tom Meyer, SF Chronicle cartoonist, as reprinted in Ann Vileisis's Kitchen Literacy, p. 213)



We offer this, as always, to call attention to favorite Sb sponsor Dow Chemical (though I haven't seen the Dow ads for a while -- then again, I haven't been here for a while). It seems that a crew testing Michigan's Saginaw River recently found dioxin contaminations from Dow in amounts heretofore unheard of ("about 20 times higher than any other find recorded in the archives of the U.S. environmental agency"). Dioxin gets in water, water is in food, food goes in us. Upton Sinclair's concerns for adulterated food of the industrial age must seem tame by comparison to what we've been able to accomplish in the time since. (At the same time, readers might be interested to here that Dow disputes the levels found in that testing. I am shocked, just shocked.)

So to our vaunted roster of alternative sponsors, we add this vision of the contents of our food supplies and, as connected, the pollutants in our riverways and watershed.

And don't forget to visit our other sponsors -- the Grand Hotel Regina, Kaspar Schott's "How to Determine Depth of a Well," Bell Telephone, Encyclopedia Britannica, Cutter Bill, Hungarian cookbooks, and Fellman Shoes. They want to bring you high quality blogging too!

Comments

An entirely new approach to "Name your poison."

Posted by: Rebecca Haden | November 30, 2007 2:10 PM

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