Shortly after Thomas the Train derailed due to lead paint, so did my sister. "So now all of my toys will be in the garbage (it seems)," she e-mailed. "Where do you get wooden or safe, natural baby toys? What do you recommend?"
This wasn't a regular sisterly-advice request. I'm the sibling who is obsessed with organic kale and biodynamic deodorant, passions my sister doesn't exactly share. When I started trying to get pregnant, my desire to make the rest of my world as safe as the food I ate prompted me to research and coauthor The Complete Organic Pregnancy—a book in which, until recently, my sister, many of my friends, and most of the moms on my parenting message boards showed little interest.
But in the midst of endless "toxic toy" recalls and reports of harmful chemicals lurking in plastic, mothers have been contacting me in droves. They're anxious, overwhelmed, and angry that our government—the FDA, the EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission—isn't protecting our children. So they're seeking safer products, trying to figure out how to become smarter consumers. It's hard to know where to start.
During my pregnancy, I learned the language of nontoxic living. This was only two years ago, but back then it seemed that few around me were shopping at health-food stores, let alone talking environmental toxins. Other pregnant women in my office seemed to avoid me. I wasn't telling them what to do—I never would, unasked. But what I was doing to protect my growing baby, including lugging filtered water in glass bottles, wrapping my lunch in waxed paper, and leaving my nails au naturel, was, I gathered, off-putting. As Philip Landrigan, M.D., director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, puts it, "There's a natural tendency not to think about stuff that scares you."
After my daughter was born, I joined a local "mamas" group but still felt like a lonely organic geek. On learning that I write about all things nontoxic, parents inched away or, unprompted, launched into dizzying defenses of their rattles/sippy cups/whatever else was in the diaper bag that day.
Then the recalls began, and suddenly the crazy organic lady wasn't so crazy anymore. My mom boards grew frenzied with petitions to sign, guilty admissions about not tossing purchases, and much commiseration.
Next Page: Recall Mania
