Listeria Hysteria Part II

Bank holiday, and the sun is shining. In England. Talk about your once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. I however seem to be living in my own very tiny bubble of entropy. I’m going through one of those periods when I have a deleterious effect on electrical devices. It sounds unlikely but you have to witness it to believe it. Everything electronic just starts playing up, it’s bizarre. I get locked out of computers, the systems crash, passwords I’ve been using for years don’t work. Mozilla Firefox has arbitrarily decided that my Pinterest Pin button is corrupt and disabled it. For a blogger, that’s a disaster of mega-proportions. Let’s just say I’m not getting into a self-driving Tesla anytime soon. I’ve figured out over the years that it’s just a physical manifestation of a metaphysical occurrence so I don’t get freaked out anymore, and it usually only lasts a couple of days – with intense prayer and fasting 🙂 It’s jolly annoying though. I think some research should be carried out into whether human beings can affect silicon chips- one of those ‘Men who stare at goats’ – style CIA experiments. I’m not volunteering though, sinister underground labs lack the design élan I regard as essential for everyday living.

Listeria hysteria? That refers to the coverage about microbeads in the papers. 300000 gazillion in every tube of toothpaste! We’re all going to die under a deluge of microbeads!! From a scientific point of view, I have no doubt that microbeads are probably not good for fauna or maybe even flora for that matter, but the reports are long on hysteria and hyperbole, and short on scientific fact. The oceans and beaches are full of microbeads. OK. Fish are ingesting them and we are eating the fish. OK. The effects of ingested microbeads on fish? Er, dunno. The effects of ingested microbeads on humans? Er, pass. Are microbeads passed through the intestinal system with no harmful effects or does each and everyone dispose us to cancer, etc, etc? Er, pass. Never mind cancer, if I were you I’d be worrying if they cross the blood-brain barrier. Now that’s cheery! Mind you, the last portion of fish and chips I ate was kinda plastic…….

It all reminds me of the Edwina Currie ‘Listeria in Eggs’ debacle from the ’80s; that particular unedifying incident decimated the poultry industry for years. Never mind microbeads, there are over 80,000 chemicals in everyday use in the West. None of them are vitamins. As for transfats, go and look at something called the 10-year cardiovascular risk if you want to scare yourself to death. So, microbeads – ban them obviously, it’s a no-brainer. Cumulative ingestion of polyethylene is not something the human gut is set up to deal with. But please, please, some actual science so we can have ‘safe’ part per million values. As for the ‘blurred’ pictures of supposedly unidentifiable products in the papers, all I’ll say is if I owned Neutrogena, I’d be spitting tacks. Their products seem to feature a bit more frequently than the law of averages would predict, but are no worse than any of the others on the market in this respect. Maybe it’s just sloppy journalism…..

All AlaraApothecary products are microbead-free of course. That goes without saying. So are my selection of new products from the Decorex show. Please do not chew on the furniture if you wish to maintain peak health 🙂 Have a bright and sunny week.

(Photos: Ornithological Sketch cabinet;New Objectivity stools, Amy Somerville; Paradise chair, Aiveen Daly; Bauble table, Amy Somerville; Constellation light, Emile Cathelineau; Oshka pendants, Curiosa & Curiosa; Lustred pendant, Lyngard Ceramics; Ruisseau rug, Atelier Pinton)