Eating horsemeat: what are the steaks? | Henry Gee

Harder than nailing jelly to the ceiling, harder even than understanding a sermon by Dr Rowan Williams, is trying to get the general public to appreciate what is meant by 'risk'Many years ago when the world was young (okay, it was 1993) I was enjoying a leisurely lunch at CalTech in Pasadena with seismologist Dr Lucille Jones. She spent much time engaged in outreach, she explained, trying to persuade the public of California to take appropriate precautions in case of earthquakes. The problem was making sure people were well-informed without instilling mass panic. Earthquakes powerful enough to cause serious damage don't occur that often, not even in California – but when they do, they can be very damaging indeed.Achieving any sense of proportion is made more difficult by the fact that people often have little sense of relative risk. Jones recounted a salutary tale from the mid-1980s scare in the United States about the dangers of a chemical called Alar, sprayed on apples to regulate their growth. A worry that Alar might be carcinogenic caused a furore. Jones recalled seeing a TV interview with a mother who realised that she'd put an apple in her son's lunch box. Worried that the apple might have been sprayed with Alar, she gave chase to the school bus, flagged it down, marched aboard and removed the offending fruit from her son's lunch box. "And all the while she was talking to the camera," Jones said, "the woman was smoking a cigarette." Although studies showed that Alar m...
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