sciamatic

Stooooop talking shit about preservatives.

Like, I love you guys, and I love what you're trying to do, and I think so much of what you have to say is stuff that people need to hear.

But when you tell people things "Can you pronounce this word? Then it shouldn't be in your food!" and "If it has X many syllables, don't eat it!"

That's not science.

Preservatives have been a major factor in reducing hunger and famine world wide. They allow us to transport foods safe to eat and have dramatically cut down the incidence of food poisoning, food rot, and allow people to better manage their food -- that is, a family on a budget has a lot more options when food doesn't spoil after a day or two.

Preservatives don't fuck people up. There are things in foods that do and that we need to talk about and educate people on, but when you start mixing in alt-med, essentialistic voodoo, it dilutes your message, and leads to more misinformation.

So please. Staaaaahp.

Secondly, in regards to "that's not science"; you're right. These guys aren't sitting in a lab testing the effects of increased levels of mercury in peoples diets. Like many other popular science figures they fit more snugly under the banner of science communicators, which is an important role in getting new information from the researchers to the public in ways they can easily understand.

I think my point wasn't along those lines. I'm all for science communicators -- Carl Sagan got a lot of flak from the scientific community for "dumbing down" science or introducing a lot of flowery, poetic language to it, but he did effectively communicate science to the masses.

I would be all for that.

But my point was more along the lines of what Wolfbeckett points out -- the number of syllables in a word in no way communicates its health benefit to us, and saying so isn't dumbing down, or simplifying science; it just literally isn't science. There is no study anywhere that backs that up.

I guess if they started saying things like "A good rule of thumb is to look in the ingredients. While preservatives are good, it's hard for people to tell the difference between a preservative, and a more potentially harmful additive. This means that if you need to err, err on the side of food with ingredients you can easily understand."

This gets across the effective point without making it out like preservatives are bad for you.

How did you apply for the job? It's something I'm sorta interested in looking into, but I have no idea how one "starts".

Get in contact with the CatGenie folks? I use a CatGenie now -- it's fabulous. One of my cats is still not using it though, and I'm sure maybe a spray type version that can be used on their washable granules would be great.