It's not McKay Jenkins' fault that I'm afraid of my coffee cup. During a recent interview at a Roland Park coffee shop, the locally based journalist and Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English and Director of Journalism at the University of Delaware (disclosure: this writer was a UD journalism student) pointed out that the cup is made of plastic, that I have no idea what went into that plastic, and, perhaps most daunting, that the regulation of what goes into the coffee cup is so poor that there is no reason to assume that any of it is safe.

Still, it's not his fault. And what you begin to gather from Jenkins' new book What's Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World is that it's not any one person's fault--that as a whole, we've allowed our planet and our lives to be infused with synthetic chemicals, the safety of which is far from certain. Jenkins decided, after a near brush with cancer, to dissect the role of synthetic chemicals in our homes, our bodies, our water, and our lawns. As he notes in the Toxic, he found that there is quite a bit not to like: "In the last twenty-five years, the country's consumption of synthetic chemicals has increased 8,200 percent." "[T]he U.S. chemical industry, a $636-billion-a-year business, is so woefully underregulated that 99 percent of chemicals in use today have never been tested for their effects on human health." "Every day"—every day—"the United States produces or imports 42 billion pounds of synthetic chemicals, 90 percent of which are created using oil."

And all this before reaching the end of the prologue.

Still, his tone is hopeful. By demanding more information and using that information to make better choices, we can begin to sweep up the mess the past six or seven decades has left us.

City Paper: So, this book is terrifying. How did writing this book you change you?

McKay Jenkins: Well, terrifying is one response. My hope is that it will also be empowering, because when you realize the places where your food comes from and it really depresses you and then you kind of wake up to that so then you can actually make some better choices. So this book is really in the tradition of Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, where he terrifies you by taking you inside an industrial meat processor or inside the way that processed food is made and people read that and they were freaked out about their food and suddenly they were aware that they had many other options that they could choose from. And that's what this was supposed to be.

In my case I actually had a really frightening health scare that turned out by pure luck to be benign, and so I had all the fear and horror and wisdom that you get going through a cancer scare without actually getting cancer, which is a real blessing. So the research led me to look into all these different products we have and all the compounds they're made out of--and there's that, and that's frightening.

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