Medical News

Certain foods are more likely than others to wreak havoc on your stomach. Cucumbers have carried Salmonella, peaches have been contaminated with Listeria, and eating a salad feels a bit like Russian roulette. Romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and sprouts are all considered high risk for foodborne illnesses. (Scott Faber, a food-safety expert at the Environmental Working Group, put it to me bluntly: “Don’t eat sprouts.”)

By comparison, onions have an almost-divine air. They are blessed with natural properties that are thought to prevent foodborne illnesses, and on top of that, they undergo a curing process that acts as a fail-safe. According to one analysis by the CDC, onions sickened 161 people from 1998 to 2013, whereas leafy greens sickened more than 7,000. Onions haven’t been thought of as a “significant hazard,” Susan Mayne, the former head of food safety at the FDA, told me.

Not anymore. Late last month, McDonald’s briefly stopped selling its Quarter Pounders in certain states after at least 90 people who ate them fell sick with E. coli. Last Wednesday, the CDC announced the likely culprit: slivered onions. This is the fourth time onions have caused a multistate foodborne outbreak since 2020, in total sickening at least 2,337 people, according to available data. In that same time span, leafy greens have caused eight multistate outbreaks that have affected 844 people. All of a sudden, the United States seems to have an onion problem—and no one knows for sure what is causing it.

The investigation into the cause of the McDonald’s outbreak is still ongoing, but the problem likely started where many foodborne illnesses begin: in the field. The culprit, in many instances, is contaminated water used to irrigate crops. An outbreak can also start with something as simple as a nearby critter relieving itself near your veggies. Any additional processing, such as when onions are cut into prepackaged slivers, can give bacteria lots of opportunities to spread. That’s why the FDA considers most precut raw vegetables to be high risk. (As with other foods, cooking onions to 165 degrees Fahrenheit kills pathogens.)

But the fact that onions appear to get contaminated with E. coli and Salmonella at all is striking. Onions have long been thought to have antimicrobial properties that can help them fight off bacteria. Hippocrates once recommended that onions be used as suppositories to clean the body, and onions were placed on wounds during the French and Indian War. Medical knowledge has thankfully advanced since then, but the onion’s antimicrobial properties have been documented by modern science as well. In various lab experiments, researchers have found that onion juice and dehydrated onions inhibit the growth of E. coli and Salmonella. And in 2004, researchers found that E. coli in soil died off faster when surrounded by onion plants than when surrounded by carrot plants, a result the authors said might be due to “the presence of high concentrations of antimicrobial phenolic compounds in onions.”

Onions have another powerful weapon in their food-safety arsenal: their papery skin, which research suggests may act as a barrier protecting the insides of an onion from surface bacteria. The way that onions are processed should add an additional layer of protection: To extend their shelf life, onions are left to dry, sometimes for weeks, after they are harvested. This curing process should, in theory, kill most bacteria. Stuart Reitz, an onion expert at Oregon State University who has intentionally sprayed onions with E. coli–laced water, has found that the curing process kills off a significant amount of the bacteria—likely because of ultraviolet radiation from the sun and because drier surfaces are less conducive to bacteria growing, Reitz told me.

But clearly, onions are not contamination proof. Onion experts I spoke with floated some plausible theories. Linda Harris, a professor of food safety at UC Davis, posited that bacteria could hypothetically bypass an onion’s protective skin by entering through the green tops of the onion and then traveling down into the layers of the onion itself. And although onions might have antimicrobial properties, that might not always be enough to prevent an E. coli infection from taking hold, Michael Doyle, a food microbiologist at the University of Georgia, told me; when it comes to antimicrobial activity, he said, “not all onions are created equal.” And the McDonald’s onions could have become infected simply by way of probability. One of Reitz’s recent studies on the effect of curing found that 2 percent onions sprayed with E. coli still had detectable levels of the bacteria after being cured.

Still, none of this explains why onions seem to be causing more foodborne illnesses now. Harris told me that she and a colleague have “spent a lot of time trying to figure out how these outbreaks happen, and I will tell you: We don’t have an answer.” Unfortunately, we may never understand the cause of the onion’s heel turn. In many cases, regulators are unable to figure out exactly what causes a foodborne outbreak. They failed to find a definitive cause in the three other recent onion outbreaks, and perhaps the same will be true of the McDonald’s debacle.

The entire situation demonstrates the maddening inscrutability of foodborne illness. The reality is that although these outbreaks are rare, they can be dangerous. One person died after eating a contaminated Quarter Pounder, and a 15-year-old had to undergo dialysis to stave off kidney failure. Yet for all of the technology and science that goes into food safety—the genome sequencing of foodborne pathogens, blockchain technology that traces crops from farms to store shelves—we continue to be stuck with more questions than answers. America has less of an onion problem than an everything problem.

Lupus, doctors like to say, affects no two patients the same. The disease causes the immune system to go rogue in a way that can strike virtually any organ in the body, but when and where is maddeningly elusive. One patient might have lesions on the face, likened to wolf bites by the 13th-century physician who gave lupus its name. Another patient might have kidney failure. Another, fluid around the lungs. What doctors can say to every patient, though, is that they will have lupus for the rest of their life. The origins of autoimmune diseases like it are often mysterious, and an immune system that sees the body it inhabits as an enemy will never completely relax. Lupus cannot be cured. No autoimmune disease can be cured.

Two years ago, however, a study came out of Germany that rocked all of these assumptions. Five patients with uncontrolled lupus went into complete remission after undergoing a repurposed cancer treatment called CAR-T-cell therapy, which largely wiped out their rogue immune cells. The first treated patient has had no symptoms for almost four years now. “We never dared to think about the cure for our disease,” says Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist at Columbia University’s medical center who specializes in lupus. But these stunning results—remission in every patient—have fueled a new wave of optimism. More than 40 people with lupus worldwide have now undergone CAR-T-cell therapy, and most have gone into drug-free remission. It is too early to declare any of these patients cured for life, but that now seems within the realm of possibility.

Beyond lupus, doctors hope CAR-T portends a bigger breakthrough against autoimmune diseases, whose prevalence has been on a troubling rise. CAR-T has already been used experimentally to treat patients with other autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, myositis, and myasthenia gravis. And the success of CAR-T has inspired researchers to borrow other—cheaper and simpler—strategies from cancer therapy to kill immune cells gone awry. Not all of these ideas will pan out, but if any do, the next few years could bring an inflection point in treating some of the most frustrating and intractable diseases of our modern era.

CAR-T-cell therapy was originally developed as a way to kill malignant cells in blood cancer. It could, scientists later reasoned, also be used to kill specific white blood cells, called B cells, that go haywire with certain autoimmune diseases. One group tried a CAR-T-like therapy against an autoimmune disease called pemphigus vulgaris, and another CAR-T against lupus. It worked—but these experiments were only in mice.

This was the sum total of available scientific evidence when a 20-year-old woman came to her doctors in Erlangen, Germany, asking to try anything for her severe and uncontrolled lupus. None of the long-term medications typically used to manage lupus were working. Her kidneys, heart, and lungs were all failing, and she could walk only 30 feet by herself. CAR-T was risky, her doctor agreed, but lupus was killing her.

CAR-T-cell therapy could essentially turn her immune system against itself. First, doctors extracted from her blood a class of immune cells, called T cells, which they then engineered into chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells that could recognize and destroy the B cells driving her lupus. CAR-T cells can cause dangerous and overwhelming inflammatory responses in cancer patients, and her doctors did worry that CAR-T could do the same for someone with autoimmune disease, whose immune system is already in overdrive. “We take the T cells out, activate them like crazy, and then shoot those massively overactivated T cells in an activated autoimmune disease. So if you think about it, that’s kind of crazy to do that, right?” says Fabian Müller, a hematologist-oncologist at the University Hospital of Erlangen and one of the doctors on the German team that pioneered the treatment. But fortunately, the woman with lupus did not have any serious side effects, nor did any of the other patients the German group has since dosed. They are all living their everyday lives, free of lupus symptoms and medications. The woman who could walk a mere 30 feet now runs five times a week, Müller told me. She’s gone back to school and is considering studying for a master’s in immunology.

Müller and his colleagues believe that CAR-T-cell therapy works by wiping out enough B cells to trigger a “deep reset” of the immune system. CAR-T cells are dogged little assassins; they are able to find and destroy even the B cells hiding deep in the body’s tissues. A patient’s B-cell count eventually recovers, but the new ones no longer erroneously attack the body itself. Cancer patients are sometimes considered “cured” after five years of remission, and the first lupus patient to receive CAR-T is not so far off from that milestone. But the therapy cannot erase the genetic predisposition many patients have for the disease, says Donald Thomas, a rheumatologist in Maryland. Whether remission is actually durable enough to be a “cure” will take time to find out.

Still, these extraordinary results have set off a gold rush among biotech companies eager to solve autoimmune diseases. CAR-T start-ups founded to treat cancer are pivoting to target autoimmune diseases. And large pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, and Novartis are developing their own therapies. Columbia’s Askanase is now an investigator on five separate trials, all using CAR-T or a similar cellular therapy, and she hears from more companies all the time. There’s so much interest, she told me, “I don’t even know there are enough patients” to test new treatments. About 1.5 million Americans have lupus, but only a minority of them—those sick enough to justify experimental treatment but not so sick that they’ve suffered too much irreversible organ damage—are eligible for trials.

For now, CAR-T for lupus and other autoimmune diseases is pretty much only accessible in the U.S. through clinical trials—which, in effect, means it’s inaccessible to almost all lupus patients. Jonathan Greer, a rheumatologist in Florida, works in a seven-doctor practice that treats hundreds of people with lupus; not a single one has received CAR-T. He doesn’t know of a single center in Florida that is up and running to do these studies, so interested patients would have to travel out of state.

Even if it becomes FDA approved for autoimmune diseases, CAR-T is a long and expensive process. Because each patient’s own cells are reengineered, it cannot be easily scaled up. The cost of CAR-T for cancer runs about $500,000. Patients also need chemotherapy to kill existing T cells to make room for CAR-T, which adds risk, and in lupus, they usually need to taper off any medications keeping their disease in check, which can cause flare-ups. All these complications make the current iteration of CAR-T suitable only for lupus patients with severe disease, who have run out of other options.

The practical limitations of CAR-T have dogged the cancer field for a long time now, and researchers have already come up with ideas to get around it. A number of simpler strategies for killing B cells are now making their way from blood cancer to autoimmune disease. They include using donor T cells, a different type of immune cell called natural killer cells, or a molecule that binds a T cell to the B cell it’s meant to destroy. Those molecules, called bispecific T-cell engagers, or BiTEs, are “cheap, fast, uncomplicated,” Müller said, but they may not penetrate as deeply into the tissues where B cells reside. Nevertheless, in September, The New England Journal of Medicine published two successful case reports describing successful treatment in a handful of autoimmune diseases, including lupus, with a BiTE called teclistamab. Similar BiTES on the market could be repurposed for autoimmune disease too.

These simpler therapies may ultimately be “good enough,” Askanase said. And their ease of use could ultimately beat out custom CAR-T therapy, which is unlikely to reach all of the millions of people with lupus worldwide. It’s simply too expensive and too cumbersome, a problem that has held back other cutting-edge therapies that were approved to much initial fanfare. Even if CAR-T itself is never widely adopted for autoimmune diseases, it has opened the door to new ideas that could one day revolutionize their treatment.

If Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really do team up to “make America healthy again” from the White House, the implications would be surprisingly trippy. On Sunday, at his rally in Madison Square Garden, Trump said he would let Kennedy “go wild” on health, food, and medicine if he wins the presidential election. The next day, Kennedy shared that Trump had promised him control of several agencies, including the CDC, the FDA, the Health and Human Services Department, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “and a few others.”

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate, has not explained how such a position—which does not currently exist within the U.S. government—might be created. But a recent post on X offers some clues about what his leadership might entail. He outlined a number of products and interventions he wants released from federal “suppression,” including raw milk, ivermectin, and sunshine. The very first item on his list was psychedelics.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, when mushrooms and LSD were considered inseparable from the anti-war movement and hippie culture, psychedelic drugs have been culturally associated with the American left. But in this election cycle, many prominent people who’ve expressed support for or have personally used psychedelics, such as Kennedy and Elon Musk, have rallied behind Trump, the hard-right candidate. Over the past few years, libertarians, wellness influencers, research scientists, MAGA die-hards, and titans of corporate tech alike have endorsed hallucinogenic drugs. It’s clear that modern psychedelic users and advocates, as a group, have no consistent political slant. Instead, they may reveal the polarization that already plagues us.

Although the use of psychedelics long predates American politics, about half a century ago, the substances began to take on a distinctly political valence in the United States. Psychedelic advocates championed the idea that these drugs would end wars and promote left-wing ideals. In 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg told a roomful of ministers that if everyone tried LSD, “we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.” The Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary wrote in 1968 that “turning on people to LSD is the precise and only way to keep war from blowing up the whole system.”

Echoes of that philosophy still resound today, in speculations that wider psychedelic use would encourage personal and political action on climate change, or that MDMA will help eradicate all trauma by 2070. But now you’re just as likely to encounter psychedelic use in clinical trials as a mental-health treatment, as a tool for spiritual exploration, or in more individualistic applications such as optimizing and enhancing productivity. In contemporary U.S. society, there is no longer one psychedelic culture. “If the only thing you knew about someone is that they’re pro-psychedelics, that wouldn’t necessarily be an obvious indication of their political affiliation,” Aidan Seale-Feldman, a medical anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame who studies the current psychedelic renaissance, told me. “It is surreal that in this era of so much division and difference in the U.S. that psychedelics are something that people would actually have in common.”

[Read: When does a high become a trip?]

An affinity for psychedelics may be bipartisan these days, but when it comes to current advocacy, “it seems like those on the right promote psychedelics more than the left,” Jules Evans, a philosopher who directs the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, told me. Before the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for PTSD this summer, members of Psymposia, a nonprofit that describes itself as offering “leftist perspectives on drugs,” raised concerns about the approval. Rick Perry, the conservative governor of Texas, said of psychedelic legalization last year that “at the federal level, this is more supported by the Republicans.”

Last week, the German psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer wrote on X that many attendees at a recent psychedelics event in San Francisco were pro-Trump, “some of them very openly.” In recent years, Silicon Valley has moved both to the right and toward psychedelics. Musk, Trump’s largest donor, has said that he has a ketamine prescription for depression, and has been reported to take other psychedelics. Rebekah Mercer, a benefactor of Breitbart News and of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, gave $1 million to MDMA research. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has invested millions in companies researching psilocybin and other psychedelics; Thiel is also the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s mentor, and was Vance’s largest donor during his 2022 Senate race.

Kennedy hasn’t said whether he’s used hallucinogenic drugs, but he has talked about how ayahuasca helped his son process his grief over his mother’s death. Before he dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump, Kennedy had “more psychonauts around him than any presidential candidate in American history,” Evans said. Kennedy’s vice-presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, was once married to the psychedelic enthusiast and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, from whom she separated after taking ketamine and having sex with Musk. (Shanahan denies the affair.) Kennedy’s former senior adviser Charles Eisenstein has said that psychedelics are necessary to “get us out of the Matrix.”

Groups with varying political or cultural motives have long dabbled with psychedelics. The CIA wanted to use LSD as a truth serum during enemy interrogations, or as a brainwashing tool, or as a weapon on the battlefield to incapacitate soldiers. President Richard Nixon, who signed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which prohibited many psychedelics, was close friends with Claire Boothe Luce, a Republican Congress member and staunch advocate for psychedelic therapy. (Once, while she was tripping on LSD, Nixon called her for advice about his upcoming debate with John F. Kennedy. She had to call him back later.) But on the right, such views were mostly fringe. “If Richard Nixon could be alive today and see the Republican governor of Texas advocating for psychedelics, it would completely blow his mind,” Benjamin Breen, a historian at UC Santa Cruz and the author of Tripping on Utopia, told me.

Even five years ago, psychedelics might have been accurately described as a horseshoe issue, picking up people on both extremes of the political spectrum. But today, the drugs are more like a magnet, attracting Americans indiscriminately. Thanks to years of positive coverage in both traditional media and extreme outlets such as Breitbart, “psychedelics did go mainstream in the U.S.,” says Nicolas Langlitz, an anthropologist at the New School and the author of Neuropsychedelia. The number of young adults using mushrooms has nearly doubled over the past three years, and use of other psychedelics is increasing too. “The mainstreaming of psychedelics perhaps ironically signals the end of the psychedelic community,” Ido Hartogsohn, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Bar-Ilan University and the author of American Trip, told me.

One of the paradoxes of psychedelics is how they can sometimes amplify ideas people already hold or the values of the communities they’re immersed in, but at other times (such as during therapy) they can provide an opportunity for radical change. Leary thought this was the influence of “set and setting”—that a person’s mindset and environment can affect whether a psychedelic experience ends up hardening or cracking open a person’s worldview. Hartogsohn has argued that the social and cultural context in which the psychedelic experience happens matters too. And right now, the American cultural context is hyperpolarized. That might help explain why, as Evans wrote in March, “psychedelics don’t seem to dissolve the arguments of the culture wars of the last few years. They amplify them.”

This year, social-media users have circulated AI-generated videos of Trump and Musk renouncing their wealth and power after an ayahuasca ceremony, and choosing to instead devote their lives to those less fortunate. But as much as Americans yearn to reduce the country’s political polarization, the idea that psychedelics will automatically do so is a fantasy. “People may be taking the same drugs, but they are imagining very different futures,” Evans said. Psychedelic enthusiasts have long hoped that widespread acceptance of the drugs would usher in utopia. Instead, it may actually reveal how starkly American visions of utopia diverge.

When a friend pulled out her vape at a playoff-baseball watch party earlier this month, it immediately caught my eye. I had grown accustomed to marveling at the different disposable vapes she’d purchase each time her last one ran out of nicotine—the strange flavors, the seemingly endless number of brands—but this product was different. It had a screen. While she vaped, the device played a silly little animation that reminded me of a rudimentary version of Pac-Man.

In the name of journalism, I went to my local smoke shop this week, and sure enough, vapes with screens were ubiquitous. One product on the shelves, a Geek Bar Pulse X, featured a screen that wraps around the device, displaying a constellation of stars when you inhale. Another, the Watermelon Ice Raz vape, displayed a basic animation of moving flames. Vapes with screens first began to hit the market late last year, and only recently have become widely accessible. Online retailers sell vapes with screens that display what appear to be planets, rockets, and cars driving in outer space. The screens are small—just a few inches wide at most—and they are cheap: These products run as little as $25, and can last for several months.

The Watermelon Ice Raz vape that I spotted in the store reminded me of the loading screens on an old Game Boy Color. I could see how adults like me might be enticed by the nostalgia of it all. The problem is that these vapes might also appeal to kids. It’s illegal for anyone under 21 to buy a vape, but the gadgets have been popular among teens since they were first popularized by Juul. Although youth vaping rates have dropped in recent years thanks in part to public-service campaigns that have warned kids about the dangers of vaping and nicotine addiction, the inclusion of a screen risks backtracking the progress that has been made. A screen full of animations sends the message that an e-cigarette is “something for fun and games and recreation,” Robert Jackler, an expert on tobacco marketing at Stanford University, told me. Just imagine you’re in eighth grade and the cool kid in your class has a vape with a screen of moving flames. You’re going to want one.

These gadgets are new enough that it’s unclear to what degree kids are using them, but they have all the warning signs. Vape companies are notorious for selling products in kid-friendly flavors such as Banana Taffy Freeze and Cherry Bomb, and screen vapes may be the next ploy to hook kids. The vaping industry “will do anything that it takes to bring in novel features to attract new users, and this is just another example of that,” Laura Struik, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan who has studied youth use of e-cigarettes, told me. One of the most popular vape brands among teens, Mr. Fog, has already launched a screen vape.

Screen vapes run the risk of becoming a fad, and fads spread among kids because someone they look up to uses them, Emily Moorlock, a senior lecturer in marketing at Sheffield Hallam University who has written about youth vaping, told me. That was certainly my experience as a kid. I remember begging my parents for a Game Boy because other kids in my elementary school had them. Vaping is similar: When the government asks kids to explain the reason they tried vaping, the top explanation is that a friend does it.

Screens might also make vapes more addictive. Even the simplest visuals, such as retro video games, have been shown to cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward. Even the more rudimentary vapes I encountered—those that just play little animations on a loop—could spike dopamine, and thus increase users’ desire for these products, three experts told me.

Tony Abboud, the head of the Vapor Technology Association, a lobbying group, described them to me as a technological advancement. Besides the animations, many of these screens tend to display how much battery and vapable nicotine juice is left in the device. Abboud said that public-health groups are trying to brand screen vapes as “the next bad example” of how the industry is marketing to kids, despite youth vaping rates dropping. “Just because a new technology has a new feature doesn’t mean that feature was designed to allow the product to be marketed to kids,” he said.

Abboud and other vaping defenders have a point that e-cigarettes aren’t just an enticement for kids to get addicted to nicotine, but are also a tool to help smokers quit smoking. Vapes can benefit public health because they are safer than cigarettes and as effective, or more effective, than other anti-smoking products on the market. Even flavored vapes—which do attract kids—also can help entice adults to switch out their cigarettes for a vape.

But a screen serves no purpose except for some cheap entertainment. If adult vapers want a signal that their product is low on battery, that could be solved by a little power light, like on a smoke detector. The flames and constellations simply aren’t necessary. After years of panic over youth vaping rates, it seems like kids are finally understanding that they shouldn’t vape. Why risk messing that up because of a tiny screen?

For the past several years, I’ve been telling my friends what I’m going to tell you: Throw out your black plastic spatula. In a world of plastic consumer goods, avoiding the material entirely requires the fervor of a religious conversion. But getting rid of black plastic kitchen utensils is a low-stakes move, and worth it. Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

In 2018, Turner published one of the earliest papers positing that black plastic products were likely regularly being made from recycled electronic waste. The clue was the plastic’s concerning levels of flame retardants. In some cases, the mix of chemicals matched the profile of those commonly found in computer and television housing, many of which are treated with flame retardants to prevent them from catching fire.

Because optical sensors in recycling facilities can’t detect them, black-colored plastics are largely rejected from domestic-waste streams, resulting in a shortage of black base material for recycled plastic. So the demand for black plastic appears to be met “in no insignificant part” via recycled e-waste, according to Turner’s research. TV and computer casings, like the majority of the world’s plastic waste, tend to be recycled in informal waste economies with few regulations and end up remolded into consumer products, including ones, such as spatulas and slotted spoons, that come into contact with food.

You simply do not want flame retardants anywhere near your stir-fry. Flame retardants are typically not bound to the polymers to which they are added, making them a particular flight risk: They dislodge easily and make their way into the surrounding environment. And, indeed, another paper from 2018 found that flame retardants in black kitchen utensils readily migrate into hot cooking oil. The health concerns associated with those chemicals are well established: Some flame retardants are endocrine disruptors, which can interfere with the body’s hormonal system, and scientific literature suggests that they may be associated with a range of ailments, including thyroid disease, diabetes, and cancer. People with the highest blood levels of PBDEs, a class of flame retardants found in black plastic, had about a 300 percent increase in their risk of dying from cancer compared with people who had the lowest levels, according to a study released this year. In a separate study, published in a peer-reviewed journal this month, researchers from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that, out of all of the consumer products they tested, kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants.

Another food product, black plastic sushi trays, had the highest level of flame retardants in the study. Children’s toys also ranked high: A single pirate-themed plastic children’s necklace was almost 3 percent flame retardant by weight. “When you’re using black plastic items, there’s going to be a risk that they could be contaminated,” Megan Liu, the science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future and the first author on the study, told me. Those flame retardants migrate into toddlers’ saliva and into the dust in our homes and, thus, in the air we breathe. Last year, Toxic-Free Future tested breast milk taken from 50 women in the U.S. and found flame-retardant compounds in each sample.

Many of the flame-retardant compounds that showed up in the tests that Liu and her co-authors conducted should no longer be in the product stream. Brominated flame retardants have mostly been phased out of products in the U.S. and Europe, including from many electronics. In the U.S. and elsewhere, some of the most harmful flame-retardant compounds are now illegal for use in most consumer goods. Massachusetts banned a list of 11 flame retardants in 2021. Starting this year, a New York bill restricts the use of organohalogen flame retardants—one large class of the compounds—in electronic casings, and a similar Washington State ban will go into effect in 2025.

But these compounds keep coming back. The sushi tray tested in Liu’s study contained 11,900 parts per million of decaBDE, also called BDE-209, which she described as a “really alarming” level of a chemical that was banned from most U.S. commerce in 2022 and largely phased out of production long before that. Because plastic recycling is a global economy with scant oversight, patchwork legislation may do little to keep these compounds out of the supply chain. “You send your electronic waste abroad, and you just haven’t got a clue what happens to it,” Turner told me. “I think the assumption is that it gets handled safely and it’s disposed of properly. But, you know, it comes back in the form of things that we don’t want.”

For a consumer, this problem would be simpler to handle if it was clear that only certain black plastic products posed a risk, or that all of them did. But Turner found that products were contaminated with flame retardants at random. Not all of the black plastic he tested in his 2018 study contained the compounds, and in those that did, “the amount of chemicals in the black plastic varied hugely,” he said. Some items would have the same chemical profile of what you’d expect from, say, the flame-retardant plastic housing of a television or a cellphone. Other objects would have just a trace of flame retardant, or none at all. Of the more than 200 black plastic products Liu bought at retail stores for her study, hardly any were labeled as being made from recycled materials, she said. Consumers have no way to tell which black plastics might be recycled e-waste and which aren’t. “It’s just a minefield, really,” Turner said.

Putting your black plastic in the recycling bin might seem like the right thing to do, but recycling isn’t a solution to the most noxious qualities of plastics. “I personally have been throwing out my black plastic takeout containers,” Liu told me, because if they are contaminated, “it’s scary to think that those might be reentering other products with the same flame retardants.” Until flame retardants and any dubious compounds that arise to replace banned ones are eliminated from the supply chain, reusing black plastic will perpetuate a potential health hazard. In her view, “the onus shouldn’t fall on consumers to have to make these daily changes in their lives.” Ultimately, federal bans or more ubiquitous state laws that go beyond single-compound phaseouts are the only way to keep flame retardants out of takeout containers and other black plastic intended for use in things such as foodware and toys. Until manufacturers use safer flame-retardant compounds and laws effectively prohibit recycled electronics material from entering consumer products, these chemicals will continue circulating through our kitchens, arising and re-arising like toxic zombies.

But that doesn’t mean we need to consume them by way of our kitchen utensils. Replacing a black plastic spatula with a steel or silicone option is an easy way to cut down on at least part of one’s daily dose of hormone disruptors. I’ve also taken this news as a reason to coax myself into carrying a reusable coffee mug more often, if only to avoid the black plastic lids on disposable cups—heat plus plastic equals chemical migration, after all. It’s a minefield of random hazards out there, as Turner said. Most of the time we’re trying to navigate without a map. But in at least some areas, we can trace a safer path for ourselves.

The World Series is the most important thing that can happen to a baseball player, and it is happening now to a bunch of them. You may have noticed that many have been conspicuously chewing things the entire time, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, who was blowing a bubble while misplaying a ball in the very first inning of Game 1.

The constant chewing is one of the weird things about baseball. Casual viewers respond to it by saying, “That’s weird.” Baseball fans respond to it by saying, “That’s just how it is in baseball.” And both statements are true. The chewing isn’t happening only during downtime in the dugout. Players with pizzazz blow bubbles while catching fly balls or hitting home runs. Outfielders are the most frequent chompers, but even players in the much-busier infield will sometimes spit out a shell in the middle of the action, or gnaw on a toothpick. Once in a while a player will even be tempted by the ballpark snacks that fans are eating in the stands. My question is, Why?

I’ll be honest: I care about this question because I love baseball, but also because I have a lot of dental problems and can’t personally imagine putting Dubble Bubble in my mouth ever again. I became fixated on the issue following a game this June between the New York Mets and the Texas Rangers, during which pitcher Max “Mad Max” Scherzer was shown in the dugout laughing maniacally and heckling his former teammates, while also munching on sunflower seeds so aggressively that it looked as though he were munching off bits of his own teeth. I can’t tell you how distressing this was.

The chewing habit is unique to baseball, America’s best sport. You don’t chew anything while playing football because you’re probably wearing a mouth guard so that you don’t accidentally bite off your own tongue. You wouldn’t want to run around on a basketball court with something in your mouth, because you could choke on it. Even golfers and soccer players, who sometimes chew gum, do not commonly have pockets full of loose seeds, or barter with children for bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters.

Baseball isn’t merely amenable to snacking; the game is arranged around it. Other sports have locker rooms and clubhouses full of snacks, but baseball has a dugout where players sit during the game and have continuous access to those snacks. A baseball player can even keep snacks in his pockets on the field, Brian Purvis, the head of the Chattanooga branch of the Society of American Baseball Research, told me. Then he added: “I would be curious why baseball uniforms even have pockets?”

One question at a time!

As for why all of this chewing is happening, I solicited input from dozens of baseball enthusiasts including historians, journalists, former players, sports nutritionists, and miscellaneous other interested parties, such as the publicists for various candy companies. Some of them acknowledged that it’s weird. Others told me, “That’s just how it is in baseball.” And more than a few had theories to explain the practice—somehow, only one mentioned Freud.

Obviously, in the old days, baseball players chewed a lot of tobacco. This was partly on account of players’ societally average addictions to nicotine, partly on account of its stimulating and supposedly performance-enhancing effects, and partly on account of their habit of slobbering tobacco juice onto the baseball so that it would be darker and harder for the opposing team to see and hit. The slobbering (but not the chewing) was disallowed in 1920 by a rule change against “ball defacing.”

For many decades after, children watched as players smoked cigarettes in dugouts and visibly chewed dip while batting. They watched as players would, occasionally, choke on their tobacco wads and delay gameplay. The wads themselves grew even bigger and more visible in the ’80s, when players realized they could wrap their chewing tobacco in bubble gum to hold the leaves together. Tobacco was not denounced by Major League Baseball until the ’90s, when it was banned first from minor-league stadiums and then from the annual All-Star Game.

But the habit was a sticky one, and hard to get rid of entirely. If tobacco was going out of fashion, it would have to be replaced, in the words of the internet’s favorite baseball movie, by re-creating it in the aggregate. Gum could replace the chewing; seeds could replace the spitting. Hence, a 1997 headline in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: “Chew Tobacco’s Out, but Ballplayers Young and Old Agree That, Whether It’s Bubble Gum or Sunflower Seeds, You Need to Jaw on Something.”

[Read: Goodbye, Coliseum]

Tobacco is now banned from many Major League stadiums, and it was mostly banned from the sport of baseball itself in 2016, not long after Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn died from oral cancer. Bubble gum and sunflower seeds remain as popular as ever. Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman, who has been in the Major Leagues since 2010, doesn’t chew tobacco, yet he will dump an entire bag of seeds into his mouth at one time. Yankees pitcher Nestor Cortes, who made his debut two years after the tobacco ban, has said that he chews “at least 30” pieces of gum per game.

If they aren’t chewing for the high, what’s the point? Other claimed effects came up here and there during my interviews. Some people mentioned that baseball is a game that involves sliding in dirt, and that chewing gum can help you keep the taste of the field out of your mouth. Ken Clawson, a former minor-league baseball player, said he’d read somewhere that the habit gets more blood flowing to the head and can therefore help with focus. SABR’s Purvis thought chewing had to do with timing: “Something about the rhythmic moving of the mouth allows them to set their internal metronome.” Sure!

When I got in touch with John Thorn, the longtime official historian of Major League Baseball, he was unimpressed by the batch of theories that I’d gathered to that point. He said that eating is just a way of dispelling nervous energy. “The calming effect of chewing tobacco was largely in the chewing, not in the messy weed,” he told me. “The charm of sunflower seeds may be entirely attributed to Freud.”

In other words: The oral fixations relax the players, who are like so many giant, strong, and handsome babies sucking their thumbs.

Anxiety and dirt in the mouth aren’t the whole story, though. When looking to explain anything in American life, one should always look at the commercial interests involved—Big Chewing, in this case.

John Thorn walked me through the history of baseball’s relationship to the great oral-fixation industries. Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and other baseball greats appeared in ads for cigarettes, which sometimes implied that their elite athletic performance was enabled by their choice of smokes. Chewing gum came in later: Beginning in the 1920s, William Wrigley Jr., the founder of the Wrigley Company and the owner of the Chicago Cubs, allowed numerous radio stations to carry Cubs games, because this would also serve to advertise his gum. His son and successor, Philip Wrigley, provided gum to players in the clubhouse (and, incidentally, referred to his product as “an adult pacifier”). Other entrepreneurs spread gum throughout the league. Sy Berger, of the Topps trading-card company, wooed players to license out their likeness by giving them free stuff, including Topps’s hit product, Bazooka bubble gum.

Gum and baseball cards were such a natural pairing that, eventually, kids could buy a pack of gum with a baseball card in it, or a pack of baseball cards with a stick of gum in it. In 1975, the TV broadcaster and former Major League catcher Joe Garagiola hosted a bubble-blowing championship. The contest was sponsored by Bazooka, and the winner, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Kurt Bevacqua, was honored with a special baseball card. Soon after, the debut of Big League Chew gave kids an opportunity to emulate professional baseball players by chewing gum that was shredded to look like tobacco—the idea being that money could be made in preventing kids (and adults) from taking up a truly disgusting habit while continuing to channel their dreams to baseball. (They could mail in wrappers to receive a World Series–inspired ring.)

[Read: Moneyball broke baseball]

Candy companies have found ample opportunities in baseball ever since. Turk Wendell, a former relief pitcher for the Mets who is best remembered by the baseball-viewing public as the guy who wore a necklace draped with claws and teeth, was known to chew black licorice on the mound. He also received free candy all the time. “Brach’s candy in Chicago would FedEx me whatever I wanted,” he told me. “Any kind of candy—they would FedEx it to me on dry ice so it was fresh.” Today’s young players get excited about candy collaborations. The Yankees’ baby-faced shortstop, Anthony Volpe, used a Dubble Bubble–themed baseball bat in a game this year. The Mets’ baby-faced third baseman, Mark Vientos, wore cleats made by Adidas in partnership with Haribo, the German candy company whose gummy bears often appear in modern baseball dugouts.

Chewing seeds, which also goes back decades, is a somewhat less commercial custom. Reggie Jackson, who made it cool to chew packaged sunflower seeds in the 1970s, suggested that the nutrients provided by his habit could help prevent pulled muscles. “Mr. October may have been on to something,” Corey Tremble, the director of minor-league medical operations for the Texas Rangers, told me. The seeds are salty, and sodium is one of the main electrolytes lost through sweat. Chewing them during a game may work “to keep our muscles healthy and firing properly.”

Of course, there are a lot of other ways for players to accomplish the nutritional task of “consuming salt.” Many foods and drinks are salty, including—as Tremble noted—the cups of Gatorade that those guys are always swilling in the dugout. And a 1996 Wall Street Journal story about in-game sunflower seeds said that chewers were showing off their “tooth-tongue coordination” and that they stood in awe of Jackson not because his muscles weren’t cramping but, as one pitcher told the newspaper, because he “could eat ’em and spit the shells like a machine gun.”

In the process of reporting this story, I emailed 66 members of the Society for American Baseball Research, some of whom forwarded my question about chewing to still more members of the Society for American Baseball Research. The total number is unknown to me, though I received more responses than I could possibly manage.

Warren Simpson, of the West Texas chapter of SABR, got in touch to share his theory. Simpson is part of the Vintage Base Ball Association, an intriguing body that plays baseball in antique uniforms, and according to the rules of the late 1800s. In this league, it is still legal to throw spitballs, which is why Simpson himself started chewing tobacco in 2001. (He has since stopped.) He thinks chewing persists in baseball purely as tradition. Younger players chew because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do. “It’s part of what you believe is the culture,” he said.

[Read: Americans don’t really like to chew]

It’s true that baseball people are obsessed with tradition, and that kids will try to imitate their heroes. The retired center fielder Lenny Dykstra said he chewed tobacco because he’d grown up watching Rod Carew chew tobacco. Simpson told me that when he was a kid, everyone wanted to make basket catches like Willie Mays, or to be a switch-hitter like Mickey Mantle. In Simpson’s case, he wanted to get hit by a lot of pitches like his favorite player, Ron Hunt, who had set the Major League record for doing so in 1971 and famously said, “Some people give their bodies to science; I give mine to baseball.” They are not always valuable life lessons that you are learning from these idols, Simpson acknowledged. “It might have been better if he was blowing bubble gum.”

Baseball’s chewing tradition may also intersect with its long history of strategic rule-breaking. Baseball fans still gossip about which players might be flouting the tobacco ban. One of my favorite baseball players, Jesse Winker, is constantly eating Tootsie Rolls, even while running the bases—even while engaging in arguments with opposing players. I think Winker is chewing Tootsie Rolls just because he likes them, but it’s certainly true that having Tootsie Rolls or any other brown and waddish foods available in baseball dugouts gives cover to anybody else who might still be chewing tobacco. Tootsie Roll Industries, which once promised to award 1 million Tootsie Rolls to whoever scored the millionth run in the history of Major League Baseball, did not respond to my questions. Neither did the league.

That said, baseball is also a baffling sport played by fastidious people with numerous eccentricities and superstitions. Turk Wendell told me that he started chewing black licorice on the mound while he was in college. When his young teammates spat tobacco juice on his shoes, he needed a way to spit back without picking up a tobacco habit himself. “I thought, Well, I like black licorice and it looks like tobacco so it looks like I’m pretty cool,” he said. (He was chewing not-tobacco to cover up the fact that he wasn’t really chewing tobacco. This inverts the Tootsie Roll theory laid out above and also proves its feasibility.) Whatever his original motivation, Wendell got into chewing licorice, and then he never stopped. Wendell also liked to brush his teeth between innings. He did that for the first time because he had a bad taste in his mouth. (Was it dirt? I forgot to ask.) Right after, he struck out three batters. “Once you do something and you’re successful, you keep doing it,” he said.

If this is true for Wendell, perhaps it’s true for baseball on the whole. Once you’ve started chewing, how do you kick the habit?

I bet you’re still waiting for me to give the most obvious explanation for baseball’s chewing: The game is boring. Putting something in your mouth is something you do when you’re bored.

Fine. I’m a baseball fan, and I was inclined to dispute the premise, but even baseball players are partial to this theory. Wendell told me that he chewed in part because the games were so monotonous. So did Trevor May, a former pitcher and current media personality; he said that chewing sunflower seeds and gum is “the equivalent of watching a bad Netflix movie while you fold laundry.” Joe Nelson, another former pitcher, said that baseball is “incredibly boring.” Relief pitchers, in particular, spend much of the game out in the bullpen, separated from the action, he told me, and that “can get exhausting, mentally.” To chomp or spit is to stay awake and stay ready.

This makes sense to me. Agatha Christie used to eat apples in the bathtub whenever she was having a hard time working out her elaborate murder-mystery plots. You do whatever it takes to put your brain in your body.

Here I think it’s important to note that Major League Baseball prohibits the use of smartphones during games. Players in the dugout will sometimes watch footage of their at-bats on a shared iPad, leading fans to joke that they’ve been “rewarded with screen time.” But, generally, the players are more bored than you’ve been in years! You don’t remember what it’s like to be that bored. Maybe that’s why you—and I—might think all the chewing that baseball players do is weird, whereas the fans of prior generations might have understood it to be normal.

Time expands during a baseball game, and players have only what’s in their skulls to keep them occupied. “Baseball is a ponderous game with plenty of room for pastimes within a pastime,” Clayton Trutor, of the Vermont SABR chapter, told me. The snacks are raw materials. You will see players build little towers out of gum or use it to adhere a paper cup to an unsuspecting teammate’s hat. Baseball fans were tickled this year when Seattle Mariners pitcher Luis Castillo placed his sunflower seeds in the dirt in an ornate arrangement that possibly represented some kind of message to extraterrestrials.

“Baseball is a stop-action sport, and in that regard it permits not only such activities as bubble-blowing but also reflection,” Thorn told me, “and this is why baseball is the game of literature.” It was a little bit of a non sequitur, but I knew what he meant. Baseball is the subject of a good deal of classic American writing. And baseball players—though it may not always seem this way—are living the life of the mind. This is why they chew.

Fans are also in their heads. Thorn suggested that baseball’s open, airy nature is the reason that I, as a viewer, would even notice that players are chewing all the time. Arguably, watching baseball is making me a more observant and curious person.

My next questions are “Why do baseball uniforms have pockets?” and, relatedly, “Why do baseball players wear belts?”

Americans are anxious about the election. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that, as of August, politics was the leading cause of stress for seven out of 10 adults across party lines. In a poll from a mental-health-care company the same month, 79 percent of respondents reported that the presidential election made them feel anxious this year, and more than half thought about the election every day. Now that the election is imminent, one can only assume that Americans’ anxiety is even higher.

Many U.S. media outlets have responded by offering their readers advice on how to calm down. Type election anxiety into Google, and you’ll find dozens of articles instructing you to focus on aspects of life outside of politics, to spend less time watching the news, or to use relaxation techniques such as breathing exercises to subdue the negative feelings.

But there’s another way to think about election stress: A big event should prompt big feelings. The stakes of this election go far beyond anyone’s preferred party winning or losing. “Voters on both sides of the aisle are being given a message that if the other side wins, this will be the end of American democracy as they know it,” Andrew Civettini, a political scientist at Knox College, told me. Why wouldn’t you feel anxious?

In Western philosophy and psychology, emotions have long been cast as the opposite of reason. In Stoicism, emotions are considered “non-reasoning movements,” wild inner beasts that a person has to keep in check in order to live well. During the Enlightenment, reason was widely considered a better guiding force than the senses or the emotions. This notion occasionally rears its head in cognitive-behavioral therapy, which teaches patients that feelings aren’t facts, so that they can act despite their anxiety or insecurity. This week, Arianna Huffington argued in Time magazine that Americans shouldn’t be stressed out by polls. “The way to best affect outcomes is to find the eye of the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength and wisdom,” she wrote.

But political emotions motivate action all the time. “When we experience anxiety about politics, it causes us to pay more attention, and that could have positive learning effects,” Civettini said. Steven Webster, a political scientist at Indiana University, has found that political anger can push people to vote and donate to campaigns. People can, Webster told me, get too emotional about politics: Too much anger, anxiety, or fear might motivate people to support political violence, or isolate themselves from any person or news source that doesn’t confirm their beliefs. But overall, he said, “it’s not obvious to me that we should want to reduce political emotions.”

Although emotions, with their heat and urgency, can overtake and weaken people, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that they reflect inner judgments and evaluations—in other words, that they are reasonable and intelligent responses to real-world events. For example, to have fear, as Nussbaum wrote in her book Upheavals of Thought, “I must believe that bad events are impending; that they are not trivially, but seriously bad; and that I am not entirely in control of warding them off.” In this way, Nussbaum noted, emotions—not some mythic, unemotional source of rationality—reveal what we require to live well and flourish.

Throughout history, major political shifts have been met with equally big feelings, says Kerstin Maria Pahl, a historian of political emotion at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and a co-editor of the 2022 book Feeling Political. Apathy, a longstanding Christian concept, became part of Western political language at the end of the 18th century. “Not being affected by something made you a bad person, because you didn’t take any interest in the common good of mankind, or welfare of humanity,” Pahl told me.

Allowing so much emotional interest to go unchecked might sound counterintuitive in 21st-century America, where cultural forces and psychological experts teach that emotions must be regulated for optimal well-being. But election anxiety highlights what emotions are for: to reveal what we care about, and what our moral values are. Thomas Szanto, a political philosopher at the University of Flensburg, in Germany, told me that many Americans’ political emotions are fitting responses to the election cycle. “There is something at stake for people,” Szanto said. Earlier this year, Szanto and his colleague Ruth Rebecca Tietjen argued in a paper that a political emotion is appropriate if it is functional—for example, if it pushes people to vote or seek out information about candidates—and if it has a moral component that mirrors a person’s concerns about their world, and their sense of right and wrong. Anxiety is an appropriate response from a voter who believes that Donald Trump is a threat to reproductive rights, which would violate their moral belief in bodily autonomy. Similarly, a voter who believes that abortion is murder would have a fitting emotional reaction to the idea that a Kamala Harris presidency would lead to more access to abortions.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, people can conjure any emotion they want through the use of a machine called the “mood organ.” When Iran Deckard, the wife of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, programs for herself a six-hour “self-accusatory depression,” Rick asks why she would subject herself to that when she could feel anything else. She replies that it feels wrong to not respond emotionally to the ongoing calamities in their world. “That used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect,’” she tells Rick.

Americans in 2024 don’t need a mood organ to feel any variety of negative emotion in response to this election. They are feeling anxiety, sadness, and dread, all on their own. Surviving the remaining days until November 5 requires not simply turning off those emotions, but paying attention to what they are telling us.

The promise of the American food supply is that you can eat anything and not get sick. You can usually assume that whatever you buy from a grocery store or fast-food joint won’t land you in a hospital.

But lately, foodborne-illness outbreaks seem to be distressingly regular. On Tuesday, the CDC reported 49 cases and one death linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders tainted with E. coli. In the past week, hundreds of waffle and pancake products were voluntarily recalled due to potential Listeria contamination. Listeria in particular has been a problem of late: Earlier in October, more than 11 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products were recalled. And an especially bad Listeria outbreak involving Boar’s Head deli-meat products has led to 59 hospitalizations across 10 states and 10 deaths.

Many of this year’s outbreaks have occurred in foods that are preprepared—those that can be eaten as-is, without further cooking. Foods such as Quarter Pounders and waffles, yes, but also cold cuts, prepackaged salads, and jarred salsa are popular because they are convenient. That convenience comes at a cost. A rule of thumb in food safety is that “the more a food is handled prior to consumption, the higher the chances it can be contaminated,” Lawrence Goodridge, the director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, told me. Americans are left with a difficult choice: save time or risk getting sick.

Many bacteria that cause foodborne illness live among us. Listeria can be found in soil and water, and E. coli and Salmonella are normally found in human and animal digestive tracts. They become a problem when they get into food. Preprepared foods are particularly prone to contamination because they are usually processed in large, sometimes even multiple, facilities where microbes have lots of opportunities to spread. “Somebody, somewhere, or a company, has produced the food so that we don’t have to do it at home,” Goodridge said. A factory worker with mud on his shoe, or an employee who didn’t wash her hands after using the bathroom, can be all it takes to start an outbreak. Food-safety practices—such as regular cleaning, temperature control, and strict hygiene standards—are supposed to keep these factories pristine. But occasionally, they fail.

Refrigerated facilities keep most bacteria at bay—microbes grow more slowly at lower temperatures—but not Listeria, which thrives in cool conditions. Given enough time to grow, a Listeria colony forms a protective gel over itself, called a biofilm, which makes it especially difficult to get rid of. Meanwhile, E. coli typically gets into produce through water soiled with feces. Usually, contamination occurs at the farm level, but microbes can spread as fresh foods are processed into products such as precut fruit, bags of chopped lettuce, and even prewashed whole greens. When clean produce is washed together with a contaminated batch or sliced with the same equipment, bacteria can spread. Many foods are produced in a central location and then shipped cross-country, which is how a contamination event at a single farm can lead to illnesses nationwide.

This may be the reason for the ongoing Quarter Pounder debacle. According to McDonald’s, the E. coli outbreak may be linked to slivered onions, which were sourced from a single supplier that served certain McDonald’s locations in 10 states, as well as some Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut stores. Centralizing the slivering of onions no doubt increases efficiency at fast-food chains. But it also raises the risk of contamination.

In food safety, cooking is known as a “kill step,” because high heat kills most dangerous pathogens. Precut salads and fruit are usually eaten raw. Nobody cooks cold cuts, even though the CDC recommends heating them until they are steaming (who knew?). Even convenience products that are meant to be heated, such as frozen waffles and vegetables, aren’t always prepared properly at home. A toaster may not get a waffle hot enough—Listeria is killed at an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit—and thawed frozen vegetables may be eaten without being boiled first, Barbara Kowalcyk, a food-safety expert at George Washington University, told me.

To be clear, there’s no need for Listeria hysteria. “On the surface, it looks like there are many more outbreaks,” but there are no data to prove that yet, Goodridge said. Still, some recent outbreaks demonstrate that precautions are working as they should. Listeria was identified in a regular sweep of the waffle factory and products were voluntarily recalled; no cases of illness have been reported. Tools for detecting outbreaks are becoming more sophisticated, Darin Detwiler, a food-safety expert at Northeastern University, told me. A technique called whole-genome sequencing can identify instances in which people have been sickened by the same bacteria, pinpointing the source of an outbreak. Earlier this year, it was used to investigate a Listeria outbreak in Canada that killed three people and hospitalized 15.

No food is totally safe from contamination. Practically everything sold in stores or restaurants is handled in some way. Milk is pooled from any number of cows, then pasteurized and packaged. Hamburger patties are usually made with meat from many butchered cows that is then ground, seasoned, and formed. People get lulled into the idea that “the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world,” Kowalcyk said, “but that doesn’t mean that it’s safe.” People can reduce their risk of contracting a foodborne illness by buying whole foods and cooking from scratch when possible, Goodbridge said; it’s probably safer to clean and chop your own head of lettuce. Yet even that is not a guarantee. Foodborne illness also spreads in home kitchens, where cross-contamination of raw meat with other foods, unsafe storage, and food spoilage often occurs. The risks are lower for healthy people, who can usually get through foodborne illness without excessive discomfort. But for vulnerable groups—very young, very old, and pregnant people—foodborne illness can lead to hospitalization, and even death.

The recent spate of outbreaks highlights the dilemma plaguing the state of American eating. People are simply too busy and exhausted to cook from scratch. In the daily scramble to get dinner on the table, ready-to-eat food is a lifeline. But with every additional stage of preparation comes an extra helping of risk.

In the fall of 2021, Tammi Kromenaker started looking for a new home for her North Dakota abortion clinic. For more than 20 years, Red River Women’s Clinic had provided abortion care to the Fargo area, most of that time as the state’s only provider. But now Kromenaker, the practice’s owner and director, was moving it just across the state line to Minnesota. “We had seen the writing on the wall,” she told me. A few months earlier, the Supreme Court had announced that it would take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and North Dakota had a trigger law that would almost completely ban abortion if the justices ruled in favor of Dobbs.

“We closed on a new building at 3 p.m. the day before they overturned Roe,” Kromenaker recalled. Over the next 47 days, with the help of $1 million raised through GoFundMe, she oversaw a frantic move and remodel, sneaking around in a hat and sunglasses to keep the new location a secret; another planned clinic had just been set on fire in Wyoming. Meanwhile, Kromenaker’s clinic sued the state of North Dakota to block the trigger ban.

Last month, a North Dakota judge struck down the state’s abortion ban in response to Red River’s suit. Kromenaker could now return to providing abortions in Fargo, but she told me she has no plans to. That leaves the state with no dedicated abortion providers.

In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, abortion access has been all but obliterated in 14 states. Perhaps the most obvious consequence is what has happened to brick-and-mortar abortion providers: Clinics have closed, while physicians have fled restrictive states or left medicine altogether. In communities across the country, abortion pills have also been heavily restricted. A push to expand the rights of a fetus has coincided with a rise in pregnancy-related prosecutions, most of which have nothing to do with abortion—210 women were criminally charged in 12 states in the year after Dobbs, the highest number of such cases in a single year since 1973, according to one report.

The backlash has been forceful. Since Dobbs, citizens in six states have voted for ballot measures protecting abortion access. Next month, abortion rights will again be on the ballot, in 10 states. In the first presidential election since Roe was overturned, abortion has become a defining issue. Many Republican politicians, including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, have attempted to court female voters by wavering on their previous anti-abortion positions. (Trump’s wife, Melania, released a memoir this month, in which she underscored her support for abortion rights.) Meanwhile, Democrats, especially the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, have campaigned heavily on restoring national reproductive rights. But a Democratic woman in the White House or new federal abortion protections won’t turn back the clock to 2021. Call it the Dobbs legacy, or the Dobbs hangover—the effects of America’s eroded abortion access will linger for years, if not decades.

[Read: Kamala Harris’s biggest advantage]

This summer, on the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, a coalition of groups including Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that they were committing $100 million to Abortion Access Now, a campaign to pass federal legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion. Harris has floated one potential path: scrapping the filibuster to push reproductive protections through Congress. (That would probably require Democrats to control both chambers, which does not look likely.) If new federal protections were passed, “you would see overnight relief in a lot of places, depending on the nature of the legislation,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, a co-chair of Abortion Access Now and the executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, told me.

New federal protections, however, wouldn’t instantly undo the tangle of abortion restrictions that some states began enacting even before Dobbs was decided. Reproductive health in America is governed by a complex web of laws, regulations, and court decisions at the local, state, and federal levels. When the Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for abortion on June 24, 2022, trigger laws designed to ban abortion went into effect. By the end of the year, states had enacted 50 new abortion restrictions, many of them resulting in near-total bans. No federal law could immediately undo all of these restrictions at once. Around the country, clinics closed, moved, or quit providing abortions; as of March, the U.S. had 42 fewer clinics than in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research and policy group.

With so many barriers in place, some medical providers have decided that living and working in states with restrictions isn’t worth the emotional and professional toll. In one recent study of ob-gyns in Texas, where abortion is banned with few exceptions, 13 percent of respondents said they plan to retire early, 21 percent said they either plan to or have thought about leaving to practice in another state, and 2 percent said they have already left. An analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that applications for ob-gyn residency programs in Alabama, which has a total ban except in cases of “serious health risk” to a pregnant woman, dropped 21.2 percent in the first full cycle after the Dobbs decision.

[From the October 2024 issue: ‘That’s something that you won’t recover from as a doctor’]

None of these policies has reduced the number of abortions performed nationally since Dobbs—in fact, the number has increased—but their consequences have ricocheted far beyond abortion. As obstetricians have fled restrictive states, for example, access to other gynecological care has become strained, too. And this month, Louisiana reclassified the two drugs used in medication abortions as Schedule IV controlled substances, a category typically reserved for drugs with a potential for dependency, such as Xanax and Valium. Mifepristone and misoprostol, which can be prescribed by telehealth, have played a significant role in abortion access since Dobbs. In Louisiana’s bid to further restrict the drugs, the state has potentially limited their use in other routine applications, such as treating miscarriages, inducing labor, and stopping potentially fatal postpartum hemorrhaging.

Even if new federal abortion protections were passed into law tomorrow, restoring nationwide access would still likely take significant time. Clinics, for instance, need real estate and doctors and lots and lots of capital to open or move—that’s partly why, after a 2016 Supreme Court case struck down a Texas law designed to force clinics out of business, the number of providers in the state a year later remained a fraction of what it was before. After Alabama banned abortion in 2022, WAWC Healthcare, in Tuscaloosa, remained open to provide contraception and prenatal care but eventually lost its abortion provider, says Robin Marty, WAWC’s executive director. Such positions might be filled by recent graduates, but the pool of qualified providers in restrictive states will remain small for years thanks to plummeting residency enrollments—most doctors tend to stay in the state where they do their residency.

Recent legal fights in Ohio provide a glimpse of how even sweeping abortion protections don’t automatically undo the effects of restrictions, and could lead to new ones. Last year, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to an abortion. But pro-abortion-rights advocates in the state are still fighting to throw out the state’s six-week ban and a law banning telemedicine in medication abortions, among other restrictions. Meanwhile, a state legislator has introduced a new bill that would withhold state funding from cities and counties that provide funding for local groups that provide abortion-support services such as gas money for patients. The immediate result of any national abortion protection would probably be a protracted legal battle. “Every state has a different assemblage of abortion restrictions,” Inez McGuire said. “A lot of that is going to be fought out through our judicial system. That is a daunting prospect.”

Roe’s downfall also opened up space for anti-abortion activists to renew their battle to recognize the rights of the fetus as a person. In February, when the Alabama Supreme Court found that IVF embryos are legally children, anti-abortion activists widely celebrated the decision as a sign that the country was ready to engage in this debate. As support for fetal rights has grown, pregnant people have found their bodily autonomy curtailed even when they’re not deciding whether to continue a pregnancy: According to the nonprofit group Pregnancy Justice, of the 210 cases of pregnant people who faced criminal charges, just five mentioned abortion. The majority alleged only substance abuse. In one, police charged an overdosing pregnant woman with child neglect after administering Narcan.

[Helen Lewis: The women killed by the Dobbs decision]

Abortion advocates, too, are adjusting to the new reality. Abortion access had been whittled away for decades before Dobbs was decided. But now the constitutional right to an abortion in America is no longer being infringed upon; it just doesn’t exist. Several clinic directors told me that it’s clear to them now that no new law will ever provide unassailable protection. When North Dakota’s ban was struck down by a district court last month, it wasn’t the first time; the same judge blocked a nearly identical abortion ban in 2022, eventually prompting the state legislature to repeal it and pass a new one with minor changes. Just this month, Georgia’s Supreme Court restored a six-week abortion ban that a lower court had overturned while it considers an appeal. “There is no finish line here,” says Katie Quinonez-Alonzo, the executive director of Women’s Health Center, which opened a branch of its West Virginia clinic three and a half hours away in Maryland after Dobbs. “This is work that needs to be done forever.” Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of media and policy for Students for Life of America, told me that the group already has a “Roe 2.0 Rollback plan” in place, ready to deploy at the state and federal levels after the election. “We are prepared legislatively and legally to address the human rights issue of the day, no matter which way the election turns out,” she told me.

Some clinics are tired of fighting. “If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said we were completely ready to go should abortion somehow return to Alabama,” Robin Marty told me. Now she’s not so sure. “We worked in extraordinarily hostile conditions” before Dobbs, Marty said. Clinic staff faced daily protesters, in the parking lot and sometimes even at the back door. Anti-abortion activists filed malpractice complaints against them, reported them to the fire department for allegedly having too many people in the clinic, and alleged health-privacy violations after digging through the clinic’s dumpster and finding a piece of paper from a patient’s file. “Having abortion become illegal and then having it return would be even more dangerous right now. If it comes back, they’re going to be even angrier,” Marty said.

When Red River first opened, in 1998, the threat of extinction was already in the air. The previous director had chosen to name the clinic after a body of water that runs between North Dakota and Minnesota, so that the reference would still make sense on the other side of the state border. When Kromenaker finally made the move, her life became easier virtually overnight, because Minnesota was among the states that had passed abortion protections after Dobbs. “We ended up in a state where providing this care is more straightforward, more patient-centered and with less stigmatizing restrictions,” Kromenaker said. “We would never take a step back and re-inflict those restrictions on ourselves.”

[Read: Abortion pills have changed the post-Roe calculus]

The United States cannot easily go back to the pre-Dobbs status quo. In the past two years, too much has changed—more than 100 new legal provisions, dozens of clinics closed, and a cultural gulf that has grown ever wider. For both abortion-rights supporters and opponents, only one possibility remains: to inhabit the reality we all live in now.

There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.

It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the same thing about the previous world-record holder, a 2,702-pound beast grown in Italy in 2021, or the world-record holder before that, a Belgian 2,624-pounder in 2016. Each year around this time, giant pumpkins across the globe are forklifted into pickup trucks and transported to competitions where they break new records.

Michael Jordan set the record at California’s Half Moon Bay Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, considered the Super Bowl of North American pumpkin-growing. The first winner of the competition, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. In 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. “At that time, we thought, Gee whiz, can we push these things any farther?” Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that establishes global standards for competition, told me. Yet in just another decade, the record passed the 2,000-pound mark. “We’ve zoomed past that now,” Travis Gienger, the grower from Minnesota who cultivated Michael Jordan, told me. For champion growers, there’s only one thing to do next: try to break 3,000.

Giant pumpkins aren’t quite supersize versions of what you find in the grocery store. All competitive pumpkins are Curcubita maxima, the largest species of squash—which, in the wild, can grow to 200 pounds, about 10 times heavier than the common Halloween pumpkin. But decades of selective breeding—crossing only the largest plants—has created colossal varieties.

Virtually all of today’s champions trace their lineage to Dill’s Atlantic Giant, a variety bred in the 1970s by a Canadian grower named Howard Dill. Very competitive growers source their seeds from one another, through seed exchanges and auctions, where a single seed can be sold for thousands of dollars, Michael Estadt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Extension who has cultivated giant pumpkins, told me. Seeds from Gienger’s champions are in high demand, yet even he is constantly aiming to improve the genetics of his line. “I’m looking for heavy,” he said.

Yet even a pumpkin with a prize-winning pedigree won’t reach its full size unless it’s managed well. Like babies, they require immense upkeep, even before they are born. Months before planting, at least 1,000 square feet of soil per pumpkin must be fertilized and weeded. Once seedlings are planted, they have to be watered daily for their entire growing period, roughly four months. No mere garden hose can do the trick; each plant needs at least one inch of water a week, which allows the pumpkin to gain up to 70 pounds in a single day. The fruit and leaves must also be inspected at least once daily for pests and disease—no small feat as their surface area balloons. Quickly spotting and excising the eggs of an insect called the squash-vine borer, then bandaging the wounded vine, is paramount. One day, you might have a great pumpkin, “then boom, the next day, all of the vine is completely dead,” says Julie Weisenhorn, a horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota who has grown giant pumpkins—named Seymour (744 pounds) and Audrey (592 pounds).

Growers can keep pushing the pumpkin weight limit by ensuring that a plant isn’t pollinated by a variety that has subpar genes. To do so, they hand-pollinate, painstakingly dusting pollen from a plant’s male flowers into the female ones. This usually leads the plant to bear three or four fruit, but only the most promising is allowed to survive. The rest are killed off in an attempt to direct all of the plant’s resources toward a single giant. In the same vein, wayward vines are nipped, and emerging roots thrust deep into the ground, in hopes of harnessing every last nutrient for the potential champion.

Still, some factors are beyond anyone’s control. The weather can literally make or break a pumpkin. Too much rain can cause a pumpkin to grow too quickly, cracking open its flesh, which would disqualify it from competition. Too much sunlight hardens the flesh, making it prone to fractures. It’s not uncommon for giant pumpkins to have custom-built personal sunshades. North America’s giant-pumpkin capitals—Half Moon Bay, Nova Scotia, and Minnesota—have nature on their side, with low humidity and nighttime temperatures. Cooler nights mean less respiration, which means less wasted energy.

Yet nature bests even the world’s champions. This year, Gienger couldn’t break the record he set with Michael Jordan; he blames cold and wet weather, which made it harder to feed micronutrients to his pumpkin, Rudy. (At 2,471 pounds, it still won the Half Moon Bay competition.) And no matter how big a pumpkin grows, it needs to pack a few extra pounds for the road: Once they’re cut from the vine, they rapidly lose their weight in water. A pumpkin can drop roughly 10 pounds in a single day.

All of the experts I spoke with believe that 3,000 pounds is within reach. “It’s still an upward trend,” said Grande, who noted that a 2,907-pounder has already been recorded, albeit a damaged one. Pumpkin genetics are continually improving; more 2,000-pounders have been grown in the past year than ever before, according to Grande. Growers are constantly developing new practices. Each year, the Great Pumpkin Conference holds an international summit for growers and scientists to trade techniques (last year’s was in Belgium, and this year’s will be in the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field). Shifting goals have precipitated new (and expensive) methods: Carbon dioxide and gibberellic acid are being used as growth stimulants; some pumpkins are fully grown in greenhouses.

The reason that giant-pumpkin weights increased 20-fold in half a century is the same reason that runners keep running faster marathons, that skyscrapers keep clawing at the sky, and that people spend so much on anti-aging. To push nature’s limits is a reliably exhilarating endeavor; to be the one to succeed is a point of pride. Food companies, in particular, build their entire businesses on developing the biggest and best. Wild strawberries are the size of a nickel, but domesticated ones are as huge as Ping-Pong balls. Industrial breeding turned the scrawny, two-and-a-half-pound chickens of the 1920s into today’s six-pounders. There’s still room for them to grow: Strawberries can get as big as a saucer, and the heaviest chicken on record was a 22-pounder named Weirdo. But foods sold commercially are subject to other constraints on growth, such as transportation, storage, processing, and customer preference. Unusually big foods are associated with less flavor, and their size can be off-putting. When it comes to food, there is such a thing as too big.

Giant pumpkins, by contrast, have a singular purpose: to become as heavy as possible. They don’t have to be beautiful, taste good, or withstand transport, because they are not food. When companies develop boundary-pushing crops and animals, that tends to be an isolationist enterprise, shrouded in secrecy. But in the giant-pumpkin community, there is less incentive to guard seeds and techniques. Most competitions are low-stakes local affairs, and nobody ever became rich off giant pumpkins, not even Howard Dill.

Breaking records is largely seen as a communal effort. “The secret to our success is that we are a sharing community,” Grande said. In a few contests, the investment is worth it—the Half Moon Bay prize for world-record-breakers is $30,000—but “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Estadt told me. People do it, he said, “for the thrill of the win.”

All of the pumpkin experts I spoke with acknowledged that there must be a limit. But nobody has any idea what it is. Four thousand pounds, 5,000—as far as growers can tell, these are as feasible as any other goal. Every milestone they reach marks another human achievement, another triumph over nature. But even the most majestic of pumpkins inevitably meets the same fate: devoured by livestock, and returned to the earth.