DEADLY LESSON
My seventh-grade science teacher repeated two facts so often that they are still crystal clear in my memory. The first was the definition of osmosis: “the passing of a substance from a lesser concentration to a greater concentration through a semi-permeable membrane.” The other was this: dented canned food can poison you with botulism, the deadliest toxin on the planet.
Why these two facts seemed among the most important things to teach 12-year-olds in the 1990s is not exactly clear, but it stands to reason that at least the latter fact came from inherited wisdom. This middle-aged teacher in Arkansas had likely heard about botulism in canned food from his own mother and grandmother, seizing upon it as this singularly cool fact, relevant in the kitchen and in the science classroom. The terror of the botulism bacteria and the chaos it could
