In an effort to ensure the residents of East Palestine, Ohio still concerned about their health in the aftermath of the toxic chemical release from a train derailment there on Feb. 3, officials have turned to an old tactic: drinking the local water to show it's safe. While government agencies have repeatedly stated that tests shown the municipal water supply and air quality are safe, locals have reported symptoms like dizziness, headaches and rashes after tankers of chemicals were burned off in the days following the crash.
scandal that killed thousands of infants nationwide. Ray also noted Britain's agriculture minister trying to feed his daughter a hamburger to undercut concerns over mad cow disease in 1990 and Peruvian officials attempting to prove the spread of cholera in raw fish was overhyped by eating it live on television a year later.
Ray says living in Kentucky, he's seen Devil's Milkshakes consumed in person, including in Martin County, where the water was so contaminated it. Attending a town hall there, Ray recalled,"I think to both show that no changes needed to be made and also to kind of quell a lot of the opposition, a public official kind of ran to the front of the room and demanded a glass of water to demonstrate.
“I think part of the reason why this is such an interesting issue for me and why I wanted to pick a name for this in the first place was because I live in eastern Kentucky and for a long time I was involved in efforts around mountaintop removal, like getting coal miners to stop polluting rivers and water supplies,” Ray said.
Ray noted it’s difficult to track the history of The Devil’s Milkshake because without a formal term you can’t easily do research on previous instances. Conceding there is no quantitative data to prove this, he said he felt they were growing more frequent, potentially because of the opportunity for the videos to spread on social media, because of the perception of more frequent disasters or simply because people have such low trust in institutions that politicians feel they must do something.
“There are probably a lot of reasons, probably the foremost of which is that environmental disaster just seems like it's becoming more frequent,” Ray said. “Whether that's true or not, doesn't really matter, I think people perceive that that's the truth. And so I think that politicians in turn perceive that they have to be seen as doing something about it.”
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