All over the media we see advertisements saying things like “chemical-free” or “all natural” when describing some product that they are marketing, and it is definitely working. I frequently have to remind my own mother that everything is made up of ‘chemicals’, and that anyone trying to sell you something that claims otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about. But then why does it work?
I believe it is because people automatically assign the word ‘chemicals’ another meaning, such as ‘poisonous’ or ‘toxic’, and as a result they don’t want anything to do with the stuff. As Dr. Mark Lorch, an academic chemist, mentions in an article by BBC defending chemistry “We use phrases like ‘it’s chock-full of chemicals’ to imply something is artificial or bad for you”. I can honestly say that I’ve been told this from my mother to get me to stop drinking Coca-Cola. This means that not only do people not understand what they are saying, but they use the association of ‘chemicals’ with ‘toxic substance’ to justify how they live their life! This comes up in other news articles like one I found about fast food packaging containing the dreaded ‘chemicals’.
The article uses numerical data and chemical jargon such as “fluorinated chemicals” (so specific) to scare its uninformed audience into thinking fast food packaging will hurt them. What do they have to gain from this? Is “chemicals are bad for you” going to be the next “You won’t believe these 17 crazy weight loss techniques!!”?
It’s not even bad enough that the click bait industry is preying upon uninformed audiences to terrify them into reading articles, but they have no shame in who they target. This article from a website called Grandparents.com is entitled “5 Scary Chemicals Lurking in Your Favourite Foods”. Seriously? How do they even know what my favourite foods are? And why are they lurking in the food like some monster? This title is written with the sole intention of scaring the audience into reading it, because it gets you thinking “what if I eat my favourite pasta and it has these scary chemicals hiding in it?”. My grandparents have enough trouble understanding how to get their tablets to work without throwing this pseudo-information at them.
To circumvent this, I believe that either some media authority (such as the Advertising Standards Authority) needs to increase their efforts to stamp out these blatant click bait scares utilizing chemophobia at their core, or people need to have a more rudimentary education concerning ‘chemicals’. From personal experience, I know that once I explained to my little brother that water is a chemical and how it forms the basis for life as we know it, he drank it up like crazy. Understanding is key. As Stephen Hawking said (or at least is credited with saying), “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Jake Medeiros
