�Not long ago, people did not worry about the food they ate. They did not worry about the water they drank or
the air they breathed. It never occurred to them that eating, drinking water, satisfying basic, mundane bodily
needs might be a dangerous thing to do. Parents thought it was good for their kids to go outside, get some sun.
�That�s all changed now.� �from the Introduction
Many Americans today rightly fear that they are constantly exposed to dangerous toxins in their immediate environment:
tap water is contaminated with chemicals; foods contain pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics; even the
air we breathe, outside and indoors, carries invisible poisons. Yet we have responded not by pushing for governmental
regulation, but instead by shopping. What accounts for this swift and dramatic response? And what are its unintended
consequences?
Andrew Szasz examines this phenomenon in Shopping Our Way to Safety. Within a couple of decades, he reveals, bottled
water and water filters, organic food, �green� household cleaners and personal hygiene products, and �natural�
bedding and clothing have gone from being marginal, niche commodities to becoming mass consumer items. Szasz sees
these fatalistic, individual responses to collective environmental threats as an inverted form of quarantine, aiming
to shut the healthy individual in and the threatening world out.
Sharply critiquing these products� effectiveness as well as the unforeseen political consequences of relying on
them to keep us safe from harm, Szasz argues that whenconsumers believe that they are indeed buying a defense from
environmental hazards, they feel less urgency to actually do something to fix them. To achieve real protection,
real security, he concludes, we must give up the illusion of individual solutions and together seek substantive
reform.
Andrew Szasz is professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz
and author of the award-winning EcoPopulism (Minnesota, 1994).