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Arsenic sandwich anyone? Mercury soup, deadly nightshade surprise? No? Really? Well, I’m baffled! They’re all natural you know. And as we know, natural is good; natural is pure. Best of all, natural is healthy.
Such is the creed that has grown up around natural products. You want to market a new range of face cream –- make sure everyone knows it is natural. You want your expensive new yogurt to sell –- include the word “natural” on the packaging. The word “natural” has become byword for purity, health and goodness.
So, why are we so obsessed by natural products? It may be that we associate science with all that is bad in the modern world –- pollution, climate change, the nuclear threat. By rejecting science and its associated chemicals, perhaps we believe that we can return to a gentler time in which the honest farmer toiled the land and people’s lives were more in tune with nature. While it is true that we have drifted away from nature, largely to the detriment of the health of the planet, this view is in danger of romanticizing the past into a golden age that never really existed. At the start of the nineteenth century, global average life expectancy was less than 30 years; today it is around 67. The infant mortality rate in Europe in the 1860s was around 230 per 1,000, compared with less than 50 per 1,000 in the 1950s. If you asked parents of the nineteenth century whether they wanted their child to be vaccinated against the ravages of polio, they wouldn’t understand why you even needed to ask. Read more...
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