Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with toxins?

The world seems filled with toxic substances. What do we do about it?

Americans are obsessed with toxins — it is a rare point of consensus in our increasingly polarized country. According to a Pew Charitable Trusts survey from earlier this year, more than 70 percent of US adults say they are worried about exposure to harmful chemicals in food and drinking water, and more than half say they have the same concerns about food packaging and kids’ products. The vast majority want the government and businesses to do something about it.

It is, in a sense, the word that animated the Make America Healthy Again movement, whose leader, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now leads the US Health and Human Services Department. “Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell in our bodies. This assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. They are swimming around in a toxic soup,” he said shortly before the 2024 election. “We are mass poisoning all of our children and all of our adults.”

They’re even permeating pop culture. My favorite song from Olivia Rodrigo’s new album is “The Cure,” in which she laments during the chorus: “I’ve got toxins in my bloodstream.”

I wanted to better understand why we are so fixated on this idea that the modern world is poisoning us. And so earlier this month, I spoke with four experts — two anthropologists, a biologist, and an environmental researcher — and probed what we can learn from our collective obsession with toxins.

From those conversations, a clearer picture of our toxin mania emerged: why we’re so worried, why different people have such different ideas about how to combat the threat of toxins, and why we’ll need more productive ways of thinking about our relationship to the chemicals that permeate our world. Here’s what I learned.

At the heart of our toxin obsession is widespread distrust

Let’s start here: A big part of the reason people are preoccupied with toxins is because of the strong scientific evidence that some chemicals can cause harm to human health. And there have been several high-profile tragedies that have demonstrated the stakes. Kim Fortun, an anthropologist at University of California Irvine, started her career studying the 1984 Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to toxic chemicals and thousands died as a result. It is one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

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But it’s far from the only one. Nicholas Shapiro, an environmental researcher at UCLA, focused early in his career on the formaldehyde exposure experienced by thousands of Americans when they were put up in provisional housing following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. “The largest formaldehyde exposure in our species’ history” is how Shapiro described it to me. And the list goes on: the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, the more recent East Palestine train derailment in Ohio in 2023, etc.

But at the same........

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