While I was slumming it in the retail world this past weekend, a customer came up to me with a tube of animal figurines. She wanted to know if they were toxic. I looked at the label which indicated they were made in China and gave her a grimace. “I don’t know,” I told her. “These haven’t been recalled yet to my knowledge.” She ended up buying them. She is a pre-school teacher, and the figurines were for her class.

The attitude that people take toward their consumer goods amazes me. That this woman, who is in charge of a classroom full of developing children, takes the grimace of an incompetent clerk as assurance that a product is fit for her classroom is an illustration of the nonchalance that we Americans exhibit toward matters of health and safety. Food, toys and vehicles are constantly being recalled due to their tendency to cause harm and everyone seems surprised. Then they go on, with little or no investigation, to use other products only to have them recalled, too.

There is a big push for heavier regulations and better screening for consumer products, both domestic and imported. There is not, however, very much movement toward understanding the risks and benefits that are associated with anything we use. Consumers, in general, do not invest themselves in what it is they are consuming, but expect someone else to. The only things they pay attention to are the special reports made on the morning news that tell the skewed interpretations of the results of a study done by questionable parties.

The reason for this “Do it until I can’t anymore” attitude, I am sure, has lot in common with the reason that I looked at pictures of naked people on the computers in my high school.

By the time I had gotten to high school, there were so many regulations in place and anti-this or anti-that applications running on the school computers that I assumed that anything that I was able to access from school was OK.

If the computer did not give me an error message and alert my teachers, then whatever I was looking at was clearly fine. It just happened that artistic nude photography was not blocked by the anti-porn software.

In the world of consumer goods, the FDA and agencies like it are the school administrators that declare they are the authority on what is good and what is bad.

Because of their evident power, no one questions what they say and, subsequently, what we end up finding while browsing.

Few people ever stop to investigate why it is that coffee mugs made in China are so much cheaper than those made in America. People rarely consider that the legal content of lead in American ceramics is much lower than what can be imported from outside the United States, or that it is more expensive to use ceramics of lower lead content. They just buy the cheapest mug they can find and laugh that people really expect them to pay a higher price for domestic goods.

With the increasing rate of recalls on the morning news, it should be apparent that what we need is not necessarily more regulations protecting us from goods, but more diligence as consumers when we are picking out the goods that we will use ourselves or give to our loved ones.

Just because no one restricted certain sites in high school does not mean that I should have spent my study hall looking at naked women, and just because no one tells you that you cannot buy a certain good does not mean that you have any business buying it.

The key to a healthier life and a better market is not to buy what looks good until someone tells you that you cannot.

The key is to take a more active role in your own well-being and safety, and to act as if you are responsible for what you consume. The truth is that, ultimately, you are.