Ask three questions about the passage from Silent Spring that I am sharing here. Answer one of your own questions in a short paragraph (4-8 sentences)
“The system by which the Food and Drug Administration establishes maximum permissible limits of contamination, called, ‘tolerances,’ has obvious defects. Under the conditions prevailing it provides mere paper security and promotes a completely unjustified impression that safe limits have been established and are being adhered to. As to the safety of allowing a sprinkling of poisons on our food – a little on this, a little on that – many people contend, with highly persuasive reasons, that no poison is safe or desirable on food. In setting a tolerance level the Food and Drug Administration reviews tests of the poison on laboratory animals and then establishes a maximum level of contamination that is much less than required to produce symptoms in the test animal. This system, which is supposed to ensure safety, ignores a number of important facts. A laboratory animal, living under controlled and highly artificial conditions, consuming a given amount of a specific chemical, is very different from a human being whose exposures to pesticides are not only multiple but for the most part unknown, unmeasurable, and uncontrollable. Even if 7 parts per million of DDT on the lettuce in his luncheon salad were ‘safe,’ the meal includes other foods, each with individual residues, and the pesticides on his food are, as we have seen, only a part, and possibly a small part, of his total exposure. This piling up pf chemicals from many different sources creates a total exposure that cannot be measured. It is meaningless, therefore, to talk about the ‘safety’ of any specific amount of residue.” (181-2)
Work cited
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring, Mariner Books, 2002.