Kids, Parents and a Toxic World  You can't protect your child
from environmental hazards just by being an informed shopper.
Thursday, October 06, 2011  Ann, my boss at my first job after
college, happened to have grown up in the same New York suburb
where I grew up, more than 120 miles from the city where we now
lived. We both got a kick out of comparing our experiences
growing up in our common hometown, a generation apart.  One of
her stories in particular stuck with me: when the DDT trucks
passed through the neighborhoods—in the 1950s, the government
sprayed the insecticide to kill mosquitoes—she and the other
kids would chase behind them, dancing in the mist of poison that
trailed behind the trucks.  The first time I heard that story,
I'm sure I was appalled. After all, not many years after Ann and
her friends played in the clouds of DDT, Rachel Carson published
her landmark Silent Spring, which pointed to the many dangers
the chemical posed to both humans and animals (including the
bald eagle, which face