SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Bottled Water, Hazardous Waste, Organic Food
Szasz, Andrew. 2008. Shopping Our Way to Safety. St Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press:
Inverted Quarantine - pp. 1-8
IntroductionPeople originally didn’t worry too much about the food that they ate, water, air, etc.
• They never viewed these as being dangerous
• That is all changed now
• People see danger everywhere. Food, water, air, sun. We cannot do without them. Sadly, we now
also fear them.
• We suspect that the water that flows from the tap is contaminated with chemicals that can make
us ill.
• We have learned that conventionally grown fruits and vegetables have pesticide residues and that
when we eat meat from conventionally raised animals, we are probably getting a dose of
antibiotics and hormones
• According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), indoor air is more toxic than outdoor
air
• Even sunshine is now considered by many a hazard. Expose yourself to too much sun and your
skin will age prematurely
• We seem to be finding dangerousness in everything!
• The response has been swift. Everywhere one looks, Americans are buying consumer products
that promise to reduce their exposure to harmful substances.
• There has been an increase in the use of bottle water since 1975
• bottled water has become the “superstar [of] the beverage industry. Also houses use some kind of
filter
• increase in the consumption of organic food
• those that can afford buy organic and natural products
A Resigned, Fatalistic Environmentalism
• new form of environmentalism - There is awareness of hazard, a feeling of vulnerability, of being
at risk
• this, however, doesn’t lead to political action to reduce toxics but rather self-protection - trying to
keep those toxics away from one’s own body
• we can describe this as a resigned or fatalistic expression of environmental consciousness
• e.g. people living in gated communities or moving to exurbia – far away from social problems as
possible
The Opposite of Social Movement
• people respond to threat differently
o start or join an organization that campaigns for reforms that address the issue
o support candidates who say they will vote for legislation that deals with the issue;
o e -mail congressmen and senators before key votes. One can organize, protest
• An Individualized Response to Collective Threat
o Social movements are collective in their goals and in their methods.
o They define problems as collective, and they say that only systemic change can fix them
o Example 1 - If food has pesticide residues, antibiotics, and hormones in it, it is because of
the way most crops are grown and most farm animals are raised in the United States
o Example 2 - If tap water has in it hundreds of chemicals at low concentrations, it is
because chemicals from farms, industry, and millions of households have been disposed
of in ways that allow waste chemicals to fi nd their way into rivers, lakes, and
groundwater
o Social movements exhort people to join with each other, to act together to
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• A Consumeristic Response to Threat
o To shield one’s self from harm in this way inevitably requires the purchase of special
items. The second obvious characteristic of this kind of response to threat, then, is that it
is a consumeristic response
• “Inverted Quarantine”
o The activity I was thinking about is similar to traditional quarantine in that it involves
processes of separation and containment to keep healthy individuals away from disease
agents.
o In its classic form, quarantine is based on the assumption that the overall collective
environment is basically healthy. Risk comes from a discrete source, such as a diseased
individual.
o The community protects public health by isolating the diseased individual(s), thereby
reducing the likelihood that others will be exposed and the infection will spread.
o The threat is not discrete, is not just here or there, not just these persons and not others, so
it is not possible to separate off the threat, to contain it, to quarantine it. Danger is
everywhere
o How are healthy individuals to protect themselves? They can do so only by isolating
themselves from their disease -inducing surroundings, by erecting some sort of barrier or
enclosure and withdrawing behind it or inside it. Hence the term inverted quarantine
• Inverted Quarantine as a Mass Phenomenon
o It was, first, a way of dealing with social threat.
o If the essence of inverted quarantine is the act of erecting a barrier between self and
threat, one can trace the practice back very far, indeed, probably to the earliest fixed
human settlements where walls were put up around the perimeter to control who entered
and, if necessary, to repel attack, and to the rise of significant social inequalities, which
required ways inside settlements to separate ruling elites from everyone else
o In the industrial cities of the nineteenth century, wealthy elites relied on inverted
quarantine methods to put distance between themselves and masses of urban poor and
working people
o At first, only the truly wealthy, a tiny minority, could afford to use such means to shield
themselves from trouble. Others, further down the class ladder, might have wished to
emulate them but could not afford do so. Today inverted quarantine has become a mass
phenomenon. Millions —many millions —do it.
• Downward Diffusion
o Inverted quarantine could not become an option for many until either incomes rose or
prices came down. In fact, both happened.
o Economic development created a large and reasonably well paid middle class of
managers, professionals, and white -collar employees.
o At the same time, the price of some big -ticket inverted quarantine items fell
• Inverted Quarantine Applied to Toxic Environmental Threats
o As people grew to be more concerns about the hazards, inverted quarantine turned out to
be readily transferable to dealing with environmental threats
o Environmental protection is the new frontier for the practice of inverted quarantine.
• Why Should the Growth of Inverted Quarantine Concern Us?
o People acting individualistically, as consumers? If that were all there was to it, the
phenomenon would hardly be worth noticing, much less writing about at length
o Individualism, as a mode of experiencing and as a mode of action, is at the core of our
culture. Consumption is too. Consuming occupies much of our time, attention,
enthusiasm —passion, even.
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o It is hardly surprising, then, to see people apply the logic of consumption to situations
(such as the one we are considering —having one’s health threatened by toxic chemicals
in the environment) that, from a naive point of view, seem to have nothing to do with acts
of shopping
o why should the growth of inverted quarantine be of interest to us?
▪ Millions living in gated communities, tens of millions living in exurbia, tens of
millions drinking bottled water, eating organic food, buying “natural” goods —
this is not just an interesting phenomenon; it is a phenomenon that is likely to
have consequences.
“The Personal Commodity Bubble,” 99-103
• Many Americans fear that they are constantly exposed to toxics in their immediate environment
• They think that tap water is contaminated with chemicals and is not safe to drink, that foods have
pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics in them, that the air carries invisible poisons.
• Within a couple of decades, bottled water, water filters, and organic foods have gone from being
marginal, niche commodities to becoming mass consumer items
• Today one finds literally hundreds of other “natural,” “green,” or “nontoxic” products, household
cleaning products, personal hygiene products, cosmetics, clothing, bedding, furniture, and so on,
on the market
• Millions of people seem to have embraced the idea that one can fend off these new threats, keep
toxics from entering the body, by buying and using such products
• Biomonitoring studies, a relatively new kind of research that directly examines subjects’ bodily
fluids, confirm that, indeed, many of these substances are now not only “out there,” but they are
inside us, too.
• Example: PBS documentary “Trade Secrets,” Michael McCally, a physician and administrator at
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, takes a blood sample from Bill Moyers. Toward the end of the
show, we see McCally tell Moyers the results. Moyers’s blood has been tested for 150 industrial
chemicals. Eighty -four different chemicals are found, including 31 different PCBs, 13 dioxins,
organophosphate pesticides (such as malathion), and organochlorine pesticides (such as DDT).
These toxic substances were in Moyers’s blood, McCally tells him, because they are everywhere
in our environment.
o you got them into you through the air you breathed. Some of them get down in
groundwater. Some of them get coated on food. You didn’t get them sort of in one
afternoon because you ate a poisoned apple
• The first large biomonitoring study, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s “National
Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals,
o looked for the presence of just twenty -seven substances
o but important ones, metals such as lead and mercury, pesticides, phthalates (a plasticizer,
not a “household name” like lead or arsenic, but found in many mundane household
products, such as soap, shampoo, deodorant, nail polish, soft plastic toys, and pacifiers).
o The study confirmed the presence of many of these substances in Americans’ bodies.
• The CDC released the “Second National Report” in 2003.5 The list of chemicals tested for grew
from 27 to 116. Of that 116, researchers found 89 in Americans’ bodies —PCBs, pesticides,
herbicides, phthalates, disinfectants, and other
• The encouraging finding was that the amounts of some substances found in people’s bodies, such
as lead, PCBs, and metabolites of cigarette smoke, had gone down from levels detected in the
population at an earlier time.
• finding was encouraging because these are substances that are either rigorously regulated or have
been banned outright, so their decreasing presence in bodies over time is concrete evidence that
regulation does work.
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Document Summary
Introductionpeople originally didn"t worry too much about the food that they ate, water, air, etc: they never viewed these as being dangerous, that is all changed now, people see danger everywhere. Expose yourself to too much sun and your skin will age prematurely: we seem to be finding dangerousness in everything, the response has been swift. Also houses use some kind of filter increase in the consumption of organic food those that can afford buy organic and natural products. The second obvious characteristic of this kind of response to threat, then, is that it is a consumeristic response. Inverted quarantine : the activity i was thinking about is similar to traditional quarantine in that it involves processes of separation and containment to keep healthy individuals away from disease agents. In its classic form, quarantine is based on the assumption that the overall collective environment is basically healthy.
