All indicators show that each year more and more Americans buy inverted quarantine products, such as bottled water, water filters, organic foods, and “organic,” “natural,” or “nontoxic” household products and personal hygiene products. Consumers obviously believe that these products will help shield them from toxic substances in our environment. As I wrote in the introduction, I am concerned about the long-term consequences for our society. What happens when many millions of people respond to environmental threats in this way?

Documenting the growing popularity of inverted quarantine products is easy. The evidence is overwhelming. Understanding the consequences is, at this point,...

On July 25, 1961, in a nationally televised speech,¹ President John F. Kennedy told the American people that tensions between the United States and Russia had reached new heights, had perhaps reached some sort of breaking point. Kennedy had just returned from a summit meeting with Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The meeting had gone poorly. Khrushchev seemed intent on forcing the United States out of West Berlin. And, Kennedy said, West Berlin was “not an isolated problem.” The Communist threat was “world-wide … Berlin … Southeast Asia … in our own hemisphere.” The stakes were immense: “The [fate] of the entire...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was still overwhelmingly rural in character. Almost three out of four Americans—71.6 percent—lived on farms and in small towns. By 2000, that figure had dropped below 20 percent; 80.3 percent of Americans were living in metropolitan areas. Like other advanced industrial nations, the United States had become an urban society.

When one looks at that 80 percent more closely, though, one sees another development, arguably at least as important as urbanization: In 1910, less than 7 percent of Americans lived in suburbs; by 2000, that number had risen...

Many Americans fear that they are constantly exposed to toxics in their immediate environment. They think that tap water is contaminated with chemicals and is not safe to drink, that foods have pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics in them, that the air carries invisible poisons. Pay no attention, go about your life, eating whatever, drinking, breathing without giving it another thought? It would be foolish to do that.

The response has been swift, even dramatic. Within a couple of decades, bottled water, water filters, and organic foods have gone from being marginal, niche commodities to becoming mass consumer items. Today...

Sometime during the 1980s, beverage industry analysts began notice that consumption of bottled waters had started to rise, and rise rather dramatically. Bottled waters had been on the market a long time. Immigrants from Europe had brought with them long-held beliefs in the medicinal properties of mineral water, so bottled mineral waters had a small but dedicated following. Local bottlers had also long been making deliveries of five-gallon jugs of water to business offices, supplying those “coolers” around which, allegedly, so much office gossip takes place. But sales of those products did not add up to anything like a significant...

The termhealth food storeused to evoke images of “shriveled produce with brown spots sold in a tiny store with sawdust strewn on a wooden floor and potted ferns hanging from the rafters.”¹ That stereotype might not have been that far-fetched a few years ago. “Health food” was for folks who were a little odd, a bit too health conscious, perhaps a bit hypochondriacal. Today, the organic food market is very different: national chains of attractive upscale organic food markets; organics on sale in mainstream supermarkets; organic labels owned by giant food corporations like Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Heinz,...

A person takes in materials from the surrounding environment a third way, breathing. An average-sized adult takes in about 450 to 500 cubic centimeters of air with each breath, from fourteen to twenty times, typically, each minute. Taking the middle of those ranges, that is about 8,000 cubic centimeters of air every minute. In English units that is about three-tenths of a cubic foot of air every minute, or over 400 cubic feet of air per day. If the air has molecules of harmful substances suspended in it, those substances are brought deep into the lung’s tiniest passages, either to...

In Part III, I turn from description to analysis, to questions of effectiveness, consequences, and prospects. Are environmental inverted quarantine products effective? What will happen if millions of people continue to seek to protect themselves by using these products?

In chapter 6, I consider these products’ effectiveness: do they work as promised and as hoped? The evidence, though scant, suggests not. Yes, some of these products provide an increment of protection, but no amount of vigilance can come even close to completely, perfectly keeping from the body all the hazardous substances now circulating in our environment.

Do these products work...

All this green and natural consuming, all this filtering—does it work? Can it work? If people use these products, do they really manage to keep toxic substances out of their bodies?

I begin by looking at what is known about the effectiveness of individual inverted quarantine products. I find that their effectiveness varies from “substantial” to “apparently none,” and in many instances their effectiveness cannot be determined at present. Of course, since the body takes in materials from the environment a number of ways, no single product, no matter how good, is enough by itself. Most consumers are not...

Inverted quarantine products do not work all that well. That does not concern me much, though it might not be welcome news to those who believe in these products and spend good money for them. What matters to me more is that peoplethinkthey work. As the great American sociologist W. I. Thomas wrote, long ago, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”¹ In this chapter, I try to understand what, in this instance, those consequences might be.

I first started thinking about inverted quarantine when some years ago I walked into a supermarket...