When nature writer Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published in 1962, there was furious backlash, particularly from chemical firms. In her book, she had carefully laid out how DDT was entering the food chain, arguing for better testing and informed use of pesticides. In her essay on Carson (Burning Questions), Margaret Atwood admits that most people were not ready for the book. “It was like being told that orange juice — then being proclaimed as the sunshine key to ultra-health — was actually poisoning you.”
For Atwood, one of the key lessons of Silent Spring was that things labelled as progressive weren’t necessarily good. “Another was that the perceived split between man and nature isn’t real: the inside of your body is connected to the world around you… and what goes into it — whether eaten or breathed or drunk or absorbed through your skin — has a profound impact on you.”
India, a sweets-loving nation, will have to reckon with some disturbing findings as a new study shows that an estimated 10.13 crore people in a population of 140 crore could be diabetic, and another 13.6 crore in the pre-diabetic stage. The ICMR-INDAB study, carried out between 2008 and 2020 across the country, is based on an analysis of the prevalence of obesity, hypertension and hypercholesterolemia or bad cholesterol.
