Close observers will note that journalists in the legacy press have a perplexing habit of engaging in outright activism for their pet ideological causes while insisting they’re merely reporting the facts to their readers. You would expect, for example, a college volunteer for Greenpeace to declare that “We need a total revamp of how products are priced to account for their impacts on the environment,” but certainly not an investigative journalist for one of America’s largest newspapers. Likewise, someone who advocates for “regulatory measures that mandate companies to make design changes to products known to leach microplastics” is not engaged in reporting by any sensible definition.
Yet those quotes come directly from the recently released book Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic, by former Wall Street Journal business reporter Saabira Chaudhuri. The book was marketed as a history of the consumer goods industry, a journalistic exposé on the growth of plastic use in daily life. But as its melodramatic title confirms, Consumed is really a chemophobic tome lamenting that innovative companies developed novel solutions to better serve their customers.
In Chaudhuri’s view of the world, consumers aren’t rational adults who choose to use plastic products that make our lives better—like disposable diapers that save time and money and minimize infections and painful rashes. Rather, we’re victims addicted to harmful plastics because big brands “poured billions of dollars” into convincing us we need them. The object of this nefarious campaign? To feed “our love affair with bottled water and our seemingly insatiable appetite for snacks and coffee on the go.”
“We were never clamoring for any of this,” she says on everyone’s behalf. “But this shift towards disposability has fundamentally transformed our daily habits.” Others might call this shift “convenience.”
Chaudhuri’s thesis is fatally flawed because it casually dismisses the indispensable, diverse roles plastics play in modern life, which is why everyone uses them. By understating their utility, she frames plastics as a scourge to eliminate with sweeping changes that would disrupt life for billions of people. Central to Chaudhuri’s view is the alarm over plastics’ health risks, but these claims are unsupported by sound evidence. She warns that “many plastics are made using a bewildering array of additives that can leach into food and drinks.” Tiny plastic particles, she notes, have been found “in everything from fetuses to the human brain,” without mentioning that none of these studies provides evidence of harm; the doses of plastic they detect are so low they are highly unlikely to impact human health.
In fact, the microplastics scare story was dealt a crippling blow last October when the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the EU’s counterpart to our FDA, issued a 53-page report blasting the research used to allege that microplastics are harmful. The agency concluded:
“Many publications are affected by methodological shortcomings in test conditions, in sample preparation, and by deficiencies in the reliability of analytical data, with the consequence of frequent misidentification and miscounting … In view of all this, there is no sufficient basis at this stage to estimate [micro- and nanoplastic] exposure from [food containers] during their uses.”
As I noted in a recent article, this is diplomatic science-speak for “microplastics research is hot garbage.” Chaudhuri’s argument is built on a foundation of studies so lousy, even Europe’s caution-addicted regulators reject them.
Chaudhuri cites a number of examples of companies phasing out certain chemicals due to public pressure, like McDonald’s removing fluorinated compounds from its wrappers, implying that there was a real risk to their customers. But she then registers worry that the ingredients used to replace those compounds could be “similarly harmful.” This highlights the incoherent nature of her proposals: existing chemicals, including those used in food contact applications, are extensively tested and regulated for safety, yet replacement substances are often not nearly as well understood. As so often happens, the activist’s zeal to “do something” replaces a good product with an inferior one.
Indeed, the harms Chaudhuri describes are based on limited and otherwise questionable research from academics who blur the line between activism and science, some of whom are even paid to malign safe products. This is, needless to say, not the consensus of a dispassionate search for facts based on robust data. Her narrative also flatly ignores the fact that regulatory bodies like the EPA continually assess the public’s chemical exposure, which has fallen substantially with industrial emissions declining by more than 50 percent since 1998.
Against Chaudhuri’s portrait of the plastics industry as bogeymen, the industry’s defenders are often quick to point out the ways plastics actually safeguard public health and the environment. And they’re right to do so: Medical devices, such as syringes, IV bags, and ventilators rely on sterile, durable plastics to prevent infections and enable life-saving procedures—benefits forgotten in the book’s critique of single-use products.
Related on the SLP
Plastics also extend food shelf life, cutting waste substantially—contrary to Chaudhuri’s somewhat bizarre and unsupported claim that “often supply chains are only as lengthy and convoluted as they are because plastic packaging has enabled them to be this way.” Without plastics, food spoilage would spike, increasing the risk of food-borne illness and harming the environment through boosted greenhouse emissions. Indeed, recent research shows that plastics actually have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than most of the alternative materials Chaudhuri and her allies insist we use instead. “In 15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer GHG emissions than their alternatives,” this study concluded.
Bottled water, a ubiquitous American staple, comes under heavy fire in Consumed, but is also usually the first product one sees delivered by the pallet-load to communities facing war, fire, famine and a whole range of other disasters.
But there’s a cynical reason why bottled water in particular is so often maligned by activists like Chaudhuri: it is a ubiquitous product, familiar to every consumer. The overarching complaint is right in her title — consumption itself — but the trick is to staple the anti-capitalism logic onto a product everyone knows and convince them it isn’t benign but somehow poisonous.
Though Consumed is well over 300 pages, Chaudhuri dedicates just a single sentence to these critical details. “Using plastic can save on carbon emissions compared to other materials,” she concedes, “and plastic offers clear functional benefits, including helping to keep perishable products fresh for longer, reducing food waste.” But if this is so, why write an entire book demonizing the material? Perhaps Consumed should have been called Preserved: How Plastics Protect Us and Our Planet.
Simply put, Consumed is more manifesto than journalism. Chaudhuri’s dramatic claims—from the “corrupting” nature of plastics to their role in various impending health crises—demand skepticism without any validation by rigorous, peer-reviewed science. But a look at Chaudhuri’s reporting on the subject going back to 2018 reveals that for her, evidence always follows from her conclusions rather than informing them.
Balanced reporting measures both sides of the story, supplying readers with the facts they need to reach a conclusion. Readers of Consumed will find that the only thing they’re being fed is ideology.
David Zaruk is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. He also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. Find David on X @Zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at Real Clear Science and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Real Clear Science on X @RCScience
