Moving toward Environmental Justice

This chapter concludes the book with a summary of the key findings. It considers the limitations of precautionary consumption to provide collective protection from widespread chemical pollution. It offers several concrete actions that will move us closer to environmental justice. These reforms require structural change and will take time, patience and a strong political willingness to enact them.

Personalizing Pollution

This chapter reveals how the environmental health movement came together to call for a broad application of a strong precautionary principle in environmental regulation, and worked hard to lobby for global and domestic policy change. As the movement presented evidence of widespread human exposure to environmental chemicals, it faced the question of how to help people understand how to contend with this exposure. Precautionary consumption was the answer. Organizations circulated a message that gendered environmental health risks in a way that understands women’s bodies as the primary pathway through which contamination enters fetal and infant bodies. Specifically, it is women’s domestic labor that provides a temporary solution to prevent contamination. Thus, this chapter tells the story of how the environmental health movement came to take a personalized and gendered approach, and why the movement is a significant part of the story behind the rise of precautionary consumption.

Safe until Sorry

This chapter outlines the United States’ uneven and contradictory relationship with the precautionary principle as a policy ethic, and, more specifically points to how the safe-until-sorry model at the regulatory level helps to explain why precaution has flourished as an individualized, consumer principle. In outlining this relationship, it documents the serious gaps in regulatory oversight in what is a vast, fractured policy framework that oversees chemicals used in agriculture and food production, and in the manufacturing of cosmetics, personal care products and consumer goods.

Introduction

This chapter sets up the central research questions that will be examined in the book and roots them in theories of neoliberalism. It provides background on widespread environmental pollution and the chemical body burden, which has led consumers to turn to precautionary consumption. The chapter outlines the scope and significance of human environmental chemical exposure. It demonstrates how the distribution of toxic substances in the environment and human bodies, and the attribution of responsibility for addressing toxic exposures, are not random. Exposure and responsibility are culturally and socially determined, with most of this responsibility allocated to women and mothers.

The High Stakes of Shopping

This examines the lived experience of precautionary consumption by drawing on interviews the author conducted with 30 New York City mothers to learn how much precautionary consumption is part of their foodwork and shopping routines. Women became aware of cultural ideals of femininity and good motherhood when they entered their reproductive years, and this translated into a deep sense of accountability for their child’s future. Precautionary consumption offered a way for women respond to these cultural ideals, and they wove precautionary consumption into existing caregiving and foodwork routines.

Precautionary Consumption as a Class Act

This chapter narrows in on the class dimensions of precautionary consumption. It explores the invisible but significant resources that some mothers used to accomplish this practice. Mothers’ routines look very different depending on how much money they have, their access to organic foods and non-toxic goods, how much time they have to read an ingredient label, weigh the costs and benefits of organic food relative to conventional food, and whether their lives can accommodate the mental effort associated with complex decisions involved in learning and practicing precautionary consumption

Be a Super Shopper!

This chapter examines how grocery stores and Whole Foods Market in particular, have driven the rise of precautionary consumption. It takes the reader through a Whole Foods Market store to understand how the company both cultivates anxiety about toxics, and promises to protect consumers from harmful substances in their food and personal care products. The chapter then turns to the product package, viewing it as powerful mechanism driving precautionary consumption. While Whole Foods Market is not the only market actor encouraging precautionary consumption, the company has helped to mark the grocery store as a site where a new, much more encompassing form of precautionary consumption is possible.