The Hazards on Your Dinner Plate

• Author: Craig M. Pease
• Position: Ph.D., a research scientist, teaches at the Vermont Law School Environmental Law Center
• Pages: 16-16

Page 16 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Sept./Oct. 2010

By Craig M. Pease

The Hazards on

Your Dinner Plate

The Environmental Law Insti-

tute’s vision of “a healthy envi-

ronment, prosperous economies, and

vibrant communities founded on

the rule of law” takes an admirably

broad perspective, recognizing that

environmental protection depends

on creating and empowering strong

economic and human social insti-

tutions. Yet the truth embodied in

ELI’s vision statement belies a critical

ambiguity in the term “healthy envi-

ronment.”

e popular media nowadays

provide us with endless accounts of

scientif‌ic research on diet and health.

As I write, one can read popular ac-

counts of recent research on vitamin

D, recommended dietary allowances,

diet and attention-def‌icit hyperac-

tivity disorder, diet and Alzheimer’s

disease, and on and on. What might

otherwise have been topical now just

gets buried in this research avalanche.

Nevertheless, the environmental law

community might want to step back,

and take stock.

At one level, this is a simple story

about two alternative ways of def‌in-

ing the “environment.” e scientif‌ic

literature explicitly recognizes diet

and tobacco smoking as key envi-

ronmental determinants of human

health — for example, a Google

Scholar search will quickly turn up

literally thousands of scientif‌ic papers

that explicitly refer to diet and/or to-

bacco as a part of the environment.

To a scientist, the environment in-

cludes the food on your dinner plate.

Yet rather strikingly, diet and tobacco

are also outside the traditional pur-

view of environmental law.

More than semantics is at issue

here. Everyone is familiar with to-

bacco’s toll. Less well known is the

scientif‌ic literature summarized in

Julian Peto’s and William Willett’s

reviews, showing that diet’s impact

on mortality from heart disease and

cancer is on par with that of tobacco.

Many details remain to be worked

out. But the overall pattern is unmis-

takable: e typical U.S. diet con-

tains too many calories, and too few

micronutrients. More pragmatically,

we eat too much high fructose corn

syrup, and too few fresh fruits and

vegetables. Critically, as argued by

Bruce Ames and his colleagues, the

risks to human health from diet and

tobacco (the broad def‌inition) are at

least an order of magnitude larger

than the risks from

classic environmental

toxins such as pesti-

cide residues in food

or even dioxin (the

narrow def‌inition).

Alas, the classic

tools of environmen-

tal law and policy may well be inef-

fective in addressing the risks posed

by tobacco and diet. Here a useful

starting point is Paul Slovic and col-

leagues’ research showing that hu-

mans consistently underestimate the

risks of what we can control, and

overestimate the risks of what we

cannot (e.g., many perceive that driv-

ing a car is less hazardous than riding

in an airplane piloted by someone

else). Critically, we each control the

fork that conveys the food on our

dinner plate to our mouth. It seems

to me that the perception that we

control our own diet is unlikely to

change, even though that control is

far from absolute (e.g., former FDA

commissioner David Kessler’s recent

book summarizing the biochemical

and neurological evidence that fatty

and salty foods are addictive, or the

dearth of grocery stores selling fresh

produce in many inner cities, or Ber-

nard Gesch’s stunning experimental

evidence linking violent behavior to

subclinical dietary def‌iciencies).

e classic tools of environmental

law — government regulation and

litigation — work best when applied

to risks perceived as being beyond

the control of individuals subjected

to them (e.g., toxins released into

the environment by polluters), and

work less well with risks perceived to

be within the control of individuals

(e.g., the food on your dinner plate).

e command-and-control envi-

ronmental statutes of the 1970s im-

plicitly assume that the government

needs to control hazards because in-

dividuals subjected to them cannot

— else there would be no reason for

the government to exert any control.

Similarly, you can’t sue yourself. If the

hazard is a consequence of your own

choices, there is nobody to sue.

us, I am skepti-

cal that tweaking the

existing tools of en-

vironmental law will

solve the smoking

and diet problems —

consider the inability

of labeling laws to

stem, or even have much impact, on

the ongoing tobacco and obesity epi-

demics.

If environmental advocacy is to ef-

fect real change, it must deploy its scarce

resources to deliver the most ef‌fective

solutions to our most pressing environ-

mental problems. ere is opportunity

here for those pursuing more tradition-

al environmental advocacy to reach out

and form coalitions with those creating

and employing a broader range of tools.

Here it seems that any ef‌fective solution

will involve not imposing control or as-

signing blame, but rather creating more

and better choices.

Craig M. Pease, Ph.D., a research scien-

tist, teaches at the Verm ont Law School En-

vironmental L aw Center. He can be reached

at cpease@ve rmontlaw.edu.

S   L

Diet and tobacco

are outside the

traditional pur view of

enironmental l aw