Purity

I recently read this Propublica article on the decades-long scandal of manufacturing companies concealing the toxicity of PFAS — a group of chemicals used in our cookware and food packaging and dumped into our water. Maybe some of you have have been following this for awhile, but for me, the scale of wrongdoing by companies who remain so powerful and prosperous came as a shock. I remember hearing that Teflon was linked to cancer, and we swapped out our nonsticks for ceramic awhile ago, but I didn’t realize how ubiquitous the chemicals were and that it wasn’t until this year that the government even started trying to remove them from municipal water or the FDA told companies to keep them out of food packaging (not an outright ban but a “voluntary market phase-out”). At this point, every human on the planet, including the ones in utero, has PFAS in their bloodstream, along with species from tigers to polar bears.

To summarize the history: PFAS chemicals came out of the Manhattan Project. They’re carbon-flourine chains resistant to oil, water, and heat and basically never degrade, which is why they’re called “forever chemicals.” After WWII, chemical companies like 3M began producing them and manufacturers like DuPont began using them in cookware and other household products. Very early on, scientists at both companies had evidence that the chemicals a) killed lab rats, b) caused health issues and birth defects among their factory workers, and c) were present in the blood of consumers of the companies’ products. But they didn’t reduce their use, which was technically legal because the chemicals weren’t regulated by the EPA. The EPA’s strategy for dealing with new substances has been to allow companies to “self-regulate” until the EPA has evidence that the new things are actually incredibly toxic. This strategy led to the poisoning of a whole city in West Virginia (watch the movie Dark Waters) and the proliferation of PFAS in all kinds of products. 3M and DuPont have both been successfully sued; no one has gone to jail and both companies continue to make upwards of 12 billion a year.

I sucked down the bulk of this information in a rush over the course of a few days, obsessing over molecules and trying to connect what I was learning to the cooking tools and packaging that I use in the kitchen. It’s not easy to find out what actually contains PFAS, since they’re still mostly unregulated. I bought an activated charcoal water filter while I researched the water system of Kingston, the upstate city we’re moving to next month. I wanted to do more with my rage, to make sure everyone knew the story. But what exactly was the story? There are at least several narrative threads tangled here together, depending on how you look at the world. There’s the story of unbridled industry power and its dominance over paralyzed government agencies. There’s the continuing inequality of the polycrisis, with poorer rural populations more likely to have contaminated water than rich metropolises. And there’s the personal aspect, which, if I was being honest with myself, was at the heart of my reaction: the intrusion into my body and Miro’s body, without my awareness.

“Intuitive toxicology is the term that [Paul] Slovic uses for the way most people assess the risk of chemicals…For toxicologists, ‘the dose makes the poison.’ Any substance can be toxic in excess…But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful.” From Eula Biss’s book, “On Immunity: An Innoculation.” A mother, from the beginning, is told what to do in all-or-nothing terms. “No amount of alcohol is safe,” warns the FDA when she is pregnant. “No sugar for kids under 2,” advises the Dietary Guidelines. We work so hard at this, to protect the borders of the bodies of our children, that the discovery that we are already contaminated with chemicals or micro-plastics feels like a personal betrayal. It might make us feel like we weren’t being vigilant enough. We need to protect harder.

When Eula Biss wrote her book in 2014, she was the mother of a young child and she intersperses her research with her own anxieties about keeping him safe. There is a darkness to that instinct for protection that she willingly plumbs. The other mothers she knows are debating the safety of the H1N1 vaccination, citing the ineptitude of government regulatory agencies and the predations of the pharmaceutical industry. “I agreed with all these concerns,” she writes, “but I was disturbed by the worldview they suggested: nobody can be trusted.”

It’s the unspoken end of that sentence (“…but yourself”) that fuels the self-protective mentality that makes us try to flee the world or to barricade in a safe haven within it. It’s the first step toward conspiracy theories and paranoia. It’s a hopeless, helpless place, because how much can a water filter really protect us? We know (and all the survivalists and preppers, they must know, right?) how flimsy our illusion of control is.

Todd Haynes, who directed the movie about PFAS water contamination in West Virginia, made another movie about environmental illness 20 years prior, called Safe. A rich housewife is plagued by an unknown disease, until eventually she connects with other people who claim “chemical sensitivity.” The film seems to suggest that while disease may be real, the treatment for it can become its own kind of disease. The characters’ obsessions with safety and contamination drive them out of their homes into a retreat center in the desert, where they are taught that no one can heal their immune systems but themselves.

As I mentioned, we’re moving out of NYC to a city two hours north, and I’m a little nervous about who I will meet there. It seems too obvious to some people why we would move — there are a lot of assumptions baked into the assumption that it’s good for a kid to have their own backyard. A park is a collective, while a backyard has a fence that can trick you into believing in borders. My hope is that the wave of urban migration of which we are now a part is not driven by a desire to escape and protect as much as it is to build and grow in a place that doesn’t demand exorbitant salaries. But I know that the reality will be a mix, and that my own desires are not completely pure.

There is almost certainly lead paint in the house we’re moving into, as there was in the house I grew up in. I was always told that my crib was set up under an air conditioner that blew bits of chipped paint around the room and my parents joked that I would’ve gotten perfect SAT scores if it weren’t for all the lead exposure. This apocrypha settled into my subconscious as a sort of realization of my original impurity. Haynes has said that while all his films are really about AIDS, he never makes them about AIDS because it’s too easy for viewers to compartmentalize as unrelated to them. Is there something consoling about universal contamination? We should fight (and maybe buy water filters) but not to secure our borders. We are open to the world before we are even born.

What I’m Cooking