But you needn't worry. This fear is alive and well at your friendly neighbourhood grocery store. At my grocer, which is more like an aircraft hangar than a store, somewhere between the spray cheese and precooked bacon, there is now an extensive organic food section, with aisles of natural herbal remedies, and an expensive additive-free kosher meat and cheese department. Right next to the red peppers are bottles of Fit fruit and vegetable wash, a product I never knew I needed. All this time, I was content with mere water.
Fear is now a multibillion-dollar industry.
Marketers preying on our paranoia is hardly new. A sure sign of how freaked out we have become is that paranoia is now chic. Fashion runways from Celine to Ralph Lauren are full of commando-styled looks from olive drab suiting complete with ammo belts to aviator glasses and camouflage chiffon. After the silent, deadly arrival of AIDS in the early 1980s, our collective faith that infectious disease had been licked by science got a swift kick in the butt. Just last month, the fear quotient jumped again with the media hype over the cryptosporidium outbreak in the tap water of North Battleford, Sask.