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

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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.

(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!