I’d over cooked the other day. Or maybe I’d catered for middle child and he’d made plans to eat less nutritious and worse value food without providing adequate notice.  So anyway, I was putting the leftovers in an old plastic box (probably a takeaway box acquired by Middle Child from another expensively nutritionless meal, undoubtedly salvaged from the wrong bin). My friend was surprised that I would put hot food in a plastic container because she’d heard the heat would cause plastic to leach into the food and cause cancer. Now, this might be true, but bearing in mind that this box’s original purpose had been to bring hot food to my door, I felt that it was a horseless-stable-open-door kinda situation. Plus, I cannot count how often I’ve heated food up in a microwave oven (potentially dodgy, right?), in a plastic box. I probably should be toast by now. Fitting, come to think of it, as I’m sure I’ve been told that overly toasted bread will kill me.  As will cooking with a gas flame. Especially if I use a non-stick pan. Heaven help me if I’m cooking sausages (edible cancer) in such a conveniently easy to clean pan. But then again, if I (over) cook sausages on the bbq, that’s just suicide. It got me thinking it would be interesting to make a list of everything I’ve been told would give me cancer, so here goes:

Teflon pans, plastic, deodorant, processed meat, alcohol, artificial sweeteners, HRT, cigarettes, direct sunshine, asbestos, WiFi/5G, burned food, effective insect repellent, non-organic vegetables. Several of these are proven carcinogenics, some of them we’re not sure, but still…

It’s an absolute miracle I’m still alive (I’m touching wood, obviously). I don’t smoke and I haven’t knowingly been ingesting asbestos), but I’m unapologetically guilty of the rest. I mean, sure, I’ve made concerted efforts to eat less processed meat, to drink sensibly and to use sunscreen. But I love a diet coke, I cannot bring myself to pay more for worse veggies, I’d never go anywhere without deodorant, I’d be a mess without my HRT, mosquitoes adore me but the feeling ain’t mutual, I’m sensible but really not puritanical about alcohol. And plastic? It’s everywhere.

So what should I do?  Clearly I should panic. I mean, the situation is dire. I’m doing EVERYTHING wrong. I might as well start smoking. Or I could detox for the rest of my life but that would be boring. And expensive.

When I start panicking about these things, I remind myself how lucky I am to have these first world problems. I don’t mean to sound glib about cancer. It’s really not funny. Especially when, like pretty much everyone, odds are that I’ll have to face that diagnosis some day. But first world survival rates are improving, so there’s that. 

Literally everything is risky. That’s not news. But a great deal of risk has been health-and-safetied out of our first world lives. I’m Gen X so obviously I’m conflicted about the rise of the risk assessment but even I have to grudgingly accept that it has encouraged us to take quite a lot of sensible precautions. It has forced employers to adhere to decent standards; standards that were adopted because some loud-mouthed, persistent, unified campaigners harrassed the sh!t out of jaded law-makers. Not out of the goodness of the corporate world’s heart.

Thus: I turn on my kitchen tap, and I get safe drinking water. I mean, sure, I wouldn’t go swimming in a river after any kind of rain (yet), but then again I’m a complete cold-water-wimp so that wasn’t going to happen. Come to think of it, I ought to add not-cold-water-swimming to my list of getting things wrong.

I get electricity at the flick of a switch. That’s awesome. I even have solar panels so I can harness the power of the sun, which should make me unambiguously happy, but am I ruining the environment with my rare earth components? Will my grand children hate me? Will I even have grand children, or will my kids refuse to bring new life into this world due to my terrible choices?

I have a car. Should I feel guilty? It’s small and electric, but again, am I a glutton for rare earths? Should I be combusting single use petrol instead?

My house is warm. Is it too warm? I can cope with donning an extra jumper, but can I handle my T-shirt- clad kids complaining about the so-called arctic thermostat settings?

I open my fridge and there’s food. Many tricky choices have been made when deciding what to buy. I want to be reasonably environmentally sustainable but I’m (still) not vegetarian. So I appease my conscience by getting plant based ‘milk’ (but is it ultra-processed?) and no red meat.  And yet I don’t get organic, locally grown veggies. Mostly because I don’t like cabbage or rhubarb. I feel guilty about that.

I open my wardrobe and there are clothes. I’m not a sucker for fast fashion (or any fashion) and yet there’s no denying I have too many clothes. Quite a lot of them might as well sit in a box labelled Optimistic! How often should I wash them? Which detergent? What temperature? Is it criminal to use the tumble dryer?

Is my mobile phone (which I’m pretty addicted to even though I can obviously justify every minute’s usage) going to kill me? Is the blue light ruining my sleep?

All these things are sodding amazing dilemmas to have. Archtypical first world problems. But still, they are problems that we have to contend with on a daily basis. We all try to make sound choices based on the information we have and our finite resources.

I try to remember this when I’m with a stressed out pregnant woman, as I pass her the kleenex. Because she’s just realised that she has to make a thousand extra choices. None of them straightforward because it’s all about risk. Probability. But of course there’s no way she can eliminate all risks, even if she risk assesses her whole life and becomes Ms health-and-safety-UK. The good news is that her baby will probably be absolutely fine even if she eats junk and watches Netflix for the whole nine months. She might well suffer unpleasant consequences from such choices (first world medicine can deal with quite a lot of them), but she can minimise these if she manages to eat a moderately healthy diet, and does a modicum of exercise. Sounds simple, right? Not so much when you’re throwing up, tired as hell and as big as a house. Plus, as I’ve discussed in an earlier post, some women will suffer these consequences regardless, it’s really unfair. But the baby? Might need a little assistance at birth, but it’ll be fine. Give it a wee bit of breast milk and a whole lot of love, access to first world health care, good education, nutritious food, decent housing, and it’ll be grand. That’s a tall order for most parents. For the next generation to thrive, we have to support the mothers. They did not choose the genes that they inherited, and they live in an imperfect, contaminated, unfair world which they cannot control. And yet we expect them to magically gestate a virtually-risk-free pregnancy. And follow that epic feat up with zero risk motherhood.  If it’s on them to be perfect, then it’s not on us to change the world… how convenient.  But taking care of ourselves is resource and time intensive. Pregnant women don’t have the bandwidth. They are literally on survival mode. We have to start making the world a better place for new mothers so that they can realistically make good  so-called choices. Because, let’s be clear, making good choices is a privilege which not everyone can afford.

Instead of panicking about our individual exposure to possible carcinogens (which, let’s face it, we can’t control), and stressing about our individual climate change contributions (although we should all do what we can, we’re not ostriches), let’s all start actively campaigning to make the world fairer, cleaner, cooler and safer for everyone. We don’t all have to release our inner Greta, though that’d be great. Or go on a mahoosive Jamie Oliver crusade, though that would be awesome. But, we could simply send our MPs the odd email (imagine if every disgruntled patient who wrote to complain also wrote to their MP). Just turning up to vote (sensibly) would be great. We cannot hope to change the world by ourselves. There is no detox regime in the world that can protect us individually if we are surrounded by toxins. Thus, our best hope is to unite. Together, small steps, relentlessly putting one foot in front the next, never giving up, we can achieve so much health and safety! My future grandchildren thank you warmly.