Preface

The ingredient label shown in Figure 1 was originally the introductory slide for an organic chemistry lecture I gave back in 2013. I posted it online in January 2014, and within a few weeks, it had become the second-most popular post of all time on Reddit Chemistry. The images were shared more than 2 million times and eventually appeared in textbooks, corporate promotional material, YouTube videos, and on T-shirts, mugs and aprons.

If you show people the ingredients text by itself, people guess it could refer to lipstick, shampoo or moisturiser. Very few people guess correctly that the lengthy ingredient label pertains to a food, and almost nobody guesses it refers to a banana! This was partly why this poster, and the 11 other fruit ingredient posters that followed it, spread so quickly online.

Businesses ranging from large drug companies down to small, local breweries commissioned me to make customised posters for commercial use. The New York Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Herald Sun and several other newspapers publicised my “Ingredients” posters, and almost all their articles referenced chemophobia. When the major Spanish newspaper El País ran an article about the ingredients posters that included a link to my Fruit Ingredients T-shirt store, I worked late into the night translating all the most popular products into Spanish and putting them at the top of the website to maximise revenue. By the end of the week, I had hundreds of new customers from Spain and a four-figure commission payment in my PayPal account.

Through conversations with customers, I realised that the people who purchased my posters and T-shirts could be categorised into two groups. The first type consisted of pro-natural, organic-eating environmentalists who mistook long-sounding ingredient names in an all-natural banana for artificial additives instead. They propagated my posters to protest what they perceived as the adulteration of our food by malevolent scientists. I call this group “chemophobic”. The second type of customers were scientists or science enthusiasts keen to fight chemophobia by making a mockery of it. (Mark Lorch of the Royal Society of Chemistry calls this “anti-chemophobia”, or “chemophobia-phobia”.) This was not the spirit with which I created these posters; however, they interpreted them this way and used them for that end. It was through the banana posters and T-shirts that I was introduced to these two conflicting, extreme ideas: “chemophobia” and “chemophobia-phobia”.

It's possible for a single word to have different meanings in different contexts (Table front.1). Here are two examples that illustrate this fact. The first is a photograph of a sign that says “chemicals” hanging above a pallet of mops and brooms. The photograph makes people laugh—chemists included—because we all know instinctively that mops and brooms are not chemicals. If everything is a chemical, as some chemists insist, then there would be nothing wrong with the placement of the “chemicals” sign, and the photograph would lack any comical value. The fact that most chemists find this image funny is an indication that the definition of “chemical” is context specific.

Here's a second, oft-cited example. All people, irrespective of their exposure to chemistry, broadly agree on the definition of a chemical weapon. Chemists sometimes ask whether a rifle or a knife is considered a chemical weapon. If everything is a chemical, as some chemists insist, then isn't every weapon a chemical weapon? These two examples are used among chemists to highlight their excessive pedantry regarding the use of the word “chemical”. Most people, including most chemists, accept that the word “chemical” can have different meanings in different contexts.

Many words have definitions that change depending on the context. Your definition of “food”, for example, depends on cultural background. Some people consider cows “food” while others consider them “sacred”. Locusts are “vermin” to most people but are considered “food” in some communities. “Chemical” is just another word with different meanings in different contexts.

Chemists need to speak the same language as the public if they're going to have any meaningful dialogue. For the purposes of this book, I propose using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “chemical” (noun): “a distinct compound or substance, especially one which has been artificially prepared or purified”.

Chemophobia is the irrational fear of compounds perceived as synthetic. “Perceived as synthetic” is an indispensable part of the definition because if we fail to concede that chemicals are usually perceived as synthetic then we arrive at the a priori conclusion that chemophobia is the fear of everything, which is clearly nonsensical. Most people use the word “chemical” to refer specifically to substances that were created synthetically such as Teflon, Nylon and petroleum.

Chemists and the public are divided by the fact that they have different definitions of what constitutes a chemical. The public usually perceives “chemicals” as synthetic while chemists often maintain that “everything is a chemical”. The dictionary sides with the public by defining a chemical as “a distinct compound or substance, especially one which has been artificially prepared or purified”. It's interesting to note that the dictionary includes “artificial” in the definition, which is a true reflection of how most people use the word in everyday speech. Chemists, on the other hand, argue that “everything is a chemical” quite vocally on social media. This viewpoint is perfectly understandable. As Abraham Maslow explains, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To my baby daughter Elizabeth, almost everything could be considered a toy. To a chemist, and only to a chemist, everything is a chemical. The public, who has a very different interaction with chemicals, sees chemicals differently, and chemists are wrong to deride the public when dictionaries include the word “artificial” in their definitions of “chemical”.

Chemophobia is a non-clinical phobia, which means that it doesn't cause clinical anxiety. We don't see people having panic attacks after reading the long ingredient names on a shampoo label in the supermarket, for example. People who have chemophobia (sometimes called “chemophobes”) may go to great lengths to avoid “chemicals” but their reaction is less extreme and less visceral than that of people who fear spiders or heights. As a non-clinical phobia, chemophobia is an informed, conscious choice influenced more by the quality of information that people receive than by any innate, irrational fears. In this way, chemophobia is pathologically similar to xenophobia, homophobia and racism and is distinctly different from arachnophobia, agoraphobia and acrophobia.

The fear of chemicals is spreading despite our world becoming a cleaner, safer place. People are becoming healthier, and product safety regulations are becoming stricter. The supposed onslaught of chemicals that these special interest groups describe simply isn't happening.

This book analyses psychological quirks, evolved millennia ago, that prime us to fall victim to chemophobic ways of thinking such as anorexia, a fear of vaccines, a fear of fluoridation or a dangerous fear of synthetic medicines. It explores how consumers, teachers, doctors, lawmakers and journalists can reduce our fear of chemicals by tackling the social issues that underpin it.