Not so long ago, Ben & Jerry's, the famous Vermont-based cult movement, made a very special announcement about the ice cream it manufactures as an offering to the Earth Spirit. "World's Best Vanilla," Ben & Jerry's proclaimed, would henceforth be sold only in containers made from unbleached paper. Bleached paper is almost always contaminated with dioxin, you see. And dioxin, Ben & Jerry's marketing material confidently asserted, causes cancer, genetic and reproductive defects, and learning disorders. Matter of fact, "the only safe level of dioxin exposure is no exposure at all," so . . . there would be no more bleach in the vanilla package, not a drop, no siree.
Then along came Michael Gough and Steven Milloy. Gough is a scientist and the former director of a federal advisory panel on Agent Orange, the dioxin-laden defoliant used during the Vietnam War. Milloy is editor of the excellent debunkery website Funk-science.com. The two men were curious about what Ben & Jerry's might now be selling inside its much-ballyhooed bleach-free paper. So they bought a pint of "World's Best Vanilla" and had it tested at an independent lab. The result: Eighty picograms of dioxin per single serving of ice cream.
Is that a lot? Yes and no. No, Gough and Milloy were quick to point out, there isn't actually a drop of clear evidence that dioxin -- even in much higher concentrations than Ben & Jerry's contains -- causes anything more serious than temporary acne. But, they went on, yes, the ice cream does include quite a lot of the junk. If, that is, you remain superstitiously concerned about the alarmist warnings of . . . well, for example, the people who make that ice cream. And the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA has established a "safe dose" level of daily human dioxin consumption, beyond which, the agency cautions, people run a serious, increased risk of cancer. A couple of scoops of "World's Best Vanilla" have 200 times this much dioxin. If you've been eating it regularly and you're reading THE SCRAPBOOK -- well, you're a miracle of medicine.
Several weeks ago, at a conference on dioxin in Monterey, California, Gough and Milloy updated their findings, further tweaking Ben & Jerry's for its hypocrisy about environmental responsibility and food safety. In the San Francisco Bay area, there's a petroleum refinery long targeted by the EPA and local environmentalists because the wastewater it releases contains dioxin in microscopic quantities. But an average-size helping of "World's Best Vanilla," Gough and Milloy reported, contains at least 2,200 times more dioxin than each liter of effluent the controversial refinery is permitted to discharge.
Surely Al Gore will want to make this "toxic" dessert a major issue in his fall campaign?