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464 © Ca n a d i a n Jo u r n a l o f So C i o l o g y /Ca h i e r S C a n a d i e n S d e S o C i o l o g i e 33(2) 2008
Bo o k re v i e w /Co m p t e r e n d u
Andrew Szasz, Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We
Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting
Ourselves. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007, 320 pp., $US 24.95 hardcover (978-0-8166-3508-5).
In Agriculture and Human Values (2007, 24:261–264), noted American
food scholar Julie Guthman recently published a column entitled, “Why
I am fed up with Michael Pollan et al.” As most CJS readers probably
know, Michael Pollan is North American’s most popular writer on food
issues, and author of the bestselling Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), as well
as In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008). To criticize Pollan
seems nothing short of sacrilege. However, Guthman makes a powerful
point: Pollan’s individualized focus on what to eat and how to connect
with local growers has the effect of drawing public attention away from
the structural causes and collective solutions required to x the industrial
food system. Guthman charges that the new wave of food writing has be-
come “a progenitor of a neoliberal anti-politics that devolves regulatory
responsibility to consumers via their dietary choices” (p. 264).
Critiquing the individualism of today’s “conscientious consumer” is
not just a concern for food scholars; it raises questions for sociologists
interested in inequality, sustainability, and consumer culture. Shopping
our Way to Safety, written by Andrew Szasz, the chair of Sociology at the
University of California Santa Cruz, is an important contribution to this
debate. Szasz makes a powerful and politically astute argument about
the wrong-headedness of individualized solutions to collective environ-
mental problems, and takes the reader through the promises and pitfalls
of consuming our way out of environmental crises.
Szasz begins the book with some fascinating history, particularly a
chapter about the fallout shelter panic of 1961. As the prospect of nucle-
ar war loomed, American families were urged to protect themselves by
building a family fallout shelter. State-sponsored bunkers never material-
ized, but individual families were encouraged to take self-protective ac-
tion. Advice ranged from washing off radioactive particles in the shower
(assuming of course, that nuclear Armageddon would leave public water
systems intact), to “fall at and cover your head,” to purchase a $700
do-it-yourself fallout shelter featured in Life magazine. When faced
with more information about the scale and severity of nuclear war, most
Bo o k re v i e w /Co m p t e r e n d u : Sh o p p i n g o u r wa y t o Sa f e t y 465
Americans realized that a basement bunker wasn’t going to offer mean-
ingful protection. A state solution — negotiation and eventual détente
with the Soviet Union — was realized and only a few hundred thousand
Americans ever built private fallout shelters.
The fallout shelter solution is relevant today because it has been
translated into myriad consumer culture commodities. A sign in my lo-
cal grocery store reads, “We have found the solution to pollution!” The
solution is to buy a canvas shopping bag to tote home groceries. Today
we can laugh about the naivety of building a basement fallout shelter to
protect against nuclear Armageddon, but is our faith in the canvas shop-
ping bag solution less laughable? Does a shopping bag really seem an
adequate response to the bevy of environmental threats facing humanity
— global climate change, rising sea-levels, the depletion of the earth’s
sh stocks, toxic nitrogen run-off from industrial agriculture, species ex-
tinction?
Szasz develops a term for these kinds of individualized consumer
solutions — “inverted quarantine,” which means to assemble “a personal
commodity bubble for one’s body” (p. 97). While the term is somewhat
bulky, it captures an important idea. Like a conventional quarantine, the
goal of inverted quarantine is to provide protection from pathology. Un-
like a traditional quarantine which connes threats to an isolated area
(e.g., a tuberculosis sanitarium), the inverted quarantine sees threats
anywhere and everywhere. The inverted quarantine objective is to build
small safe zones within a larger polluted industrial landscape. One’s
home and body become a sanitarium where you seek protection from
contaminated food, water, and air. You sleep on an organic mattress, your
child eats only organic baby food, and you drink water imported from a
pure spring in Fiji. Szasz emphasizes that these commodied solutions
inevitably have a class dimension, since consumer-based solutions re-
quire a substantial outlay of capital that only a small section of society
can consistently afford. The middle class picks and chooses a few ways
of protecting themselves, like buying a smattering of organic food prod-
ucts, while the working class and working poor are conned to a life
outside of inverted quarantine strategies.
Szasz’s book breaks down the inverted quarantine solution into three
primary parts — drinking uncontaminated (bottled) water, eating un-
contaminated (organic) food, and breathing “pure” air. He emphasizes
that it is not irrational to worry about the purity of air, water, and food,
but effectively demonstrates that individual commodities cannot provide
sufcient protection, even if consumers can afford to use all these prod-
ucts consistently. In the case of water, Szasz exposes the partiality of
contaminant protection from bottled water, as well as the mountain of
466 © Ca n a d i a n Jo u r n a l o f So C i o l o g y /Ca h i e r S C a n a d i e n S d e S o C i o l o g i e 33(2) 2008
waste produced when everybody turns to plastic bottled water for protec-
tion. Compared to the billions of plastic water bottles produced (p. 196),
the turn to organic food has been less devastating for the environment,
but it is still a partial solution — available only to a minority population,
and offering incomplete protection from contaminants. Biomonitoring
studies nd that even infants — with a wholesome diet of breast milk!
— have an average of 200 toxic chemicals like PCBs, pesticides, and
dioxins in their bodies (p. 101). Finally, Szasz points out the unfeasibility
of individualized commodity strategies for clean air. Even if one were to
religiously avoid known contaminants, like Teon and furniture treated
with ame retardants, we are all exposed to toxicity through the very act
of living and breathing. Short of building ourselves a literal glass bubble,
air contamination and the existence of a global air shed which freely
mixes toxins across national boundaries, demonstrates the absolute lim-
its of the inverted quarantine approach.
Szasz’s issue with the inverted quarantine solution is not simply
that these products don’t work and/or degrade the environment, but that
the availability of consumer commodities reduces the urgency the pub-
lic feels about environmental issues and thus reduces government ac-
tion. Szasz argues that “political anesthesia is the important unintended
consequence of mass practice of inverted quarantine” (p. 195). To use a
more concrete example: “tap water is suspect; people switch to bottled
water and stop worrying about tap water; political support for spending
on infrastructure weakens; money is not spent” (p. 199). This political
process is even more troublesome when you factor in the class implica-
tions: why would a government act to protect public infrastructure if
its most afuent and inuential members have the disposable income
to purchase inverted quarantine commodities — like organic food and
bottled water? The focus on individualized consumer solutions not only
legitimizes consumer delusions of “escaping” pollution by protecting
their individual bodies, but denies the ecological reality of complexity
and interdependence (p. 222). When PCBs show up in the breast milk
of Inuit women, and air pollution from China’s industrial cities pollutes
the air over California, it seems clear that strategies for individual self-
care are costing us time in dealing with critical environmental issues (p.
192).
This well-written and accessible book nicely summarizes the key
problems with individualized consumer approaches to environmental
regulation. While scholarly, the book is a ne piece of public sociology
that can be enjoyed by an interested lay public and undergraduate audi-
ence. Urban sociologists and theorists of space/place will enjoy Szasz’s
discussion of suburbanization (as well as the more recent ight to the
Bo o k re v i e w /Co m p t e r e n d u : Sh o p p i n g o u r wa y t o Sa f e t y 467
exurbs and gated communities) as a trend that strengthens the “inverted
quarantine” impulse; environmental sociologists and social movement
scholars will appreciate Szasz’s contribution to our understanding of mo-
bilization on environmental issues (and the disheartening lack thereof).
While some scholars are optimistic about a future of politicized con-
sumers “voting with their dollars,” Szasz predicts a future of consumer
delusion that reduces the likelihood of structural reform and state regula-
tion of production processes. Though not all will agree with this pessim-
istic conclusion, the argument is timely and raises important questions.
For myself, I was left wondering about the uidity of the boundaries
between individual-consumer and collective-citizen projects. Can some
consumer-based strategies for change become politically meaningful, as
when a consumer food co-op lobbies the federal government for better
regulation of genetically engineered foods? In addition, feminist scholar-
ship, as well as the literature on reexivity, has taught us the importance
of connecting individual change with collective imaginings. Isn’t indi-
vidual reexivity a critical part of the collective politicization process
and social movement formation? These questions do not take away from
the scholarly contribution of this book, but suggest the importance of fol-
lowing Szasz’s lead, and more seriously debating the sanity of our col-
lective strategy of individually shopping for environmental protection.
un i v e r S i t y o f to r o n t o Jo S é e Jo h n S t o n
Josée Johnston is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Uni-
versity of Toronto. Johnston’s principal interest is in the sociology of food and
the sociology of consumption, particularly the interplay between social move-
ment ideals, corporate marketing, and the rise of ethical shopping. A forthcoming
article in Theory and Society examines the construction and contradictions of the
“citizen-consumer” using the case of Whole Foods Market.
joseejohnston@gmail.com
