LA Weekly

Do you think we'd put in place some hard, rigorous standards for food safety?

Then why don't we do the same for air pollution?

The Natural Resources Defense Council's John Walke in Washington D.C. slipped NPR's Elizabeth Shogren a report proving that the EPA's own experts agree: By adopting a looser standard for soot (aka particulate matter), the Environmental Protection Agency has doomed 5,000 to 10,000 people to die early from respiratory illness.

One, I believe, died from E. Coli-tainted spinach, and less than 200 got sick.
I'm not saying we should tolerate a dangerous food supply, or fail to address the real source of E. Coli in spinach, which was probably not Natural Selection Foods' processing facility ("The detective trail," writes New York Times' columnist Nina Planck, "ultimately leads back to a seemingly unrelated food industry — beef and dairy cattle.") But our outrage about air pollution is frequently tempered by what seems to us like an indirect connection between the poison and the victim. Unless people start dying in the streets the way they did in London in 1952, we don't realize that they're dying at all.

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