Just after Christmas one year, Sara Bongiorni, a former business reporter, assessed the array of gifts strewn about her Louisiana house and was astonished to find just how many of them were made in China. She and her reluctant family agreed to go a year without buying anything from China, just to see if they could.

In the resulting “A Year Without ‘Made in China’: One Family’s Adventure in the Global Economy,” she reported that it would be impossible for any normally functioning family to avoid goods from China. She didn’t necessarily think that was a bad thing, but with multiple recalls hitting the headlines, what are consumers to do when avoidance is so difficult?

Mattel announced it would recall 1.5 million Fisher-Price brand toys, including Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer items, after discovering lead-laden paint. RC2 recalled 1.5 million Thomas the Tank Engine toys for lead paint. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recently discovered unsafe levels of lead are still in children’s jewelry shipped from China after trying to solve the problem for four years.

Most toys are made in China. Bongiorni’s son tired of Legos, one of the few toys not made there – though some are. Check those labels carefully.

Massive pet food recalls followed the deaths of animals that ate food contaminated by Chinese products. The Associated Press recently found suspect seafood from China that had been put on the Food and Drug Administration’s watch list still made it to market without being tested. Consumers were advised to dump toothpaste made in China because of unsafe amounts of a toxic substance.

The number of import inspectors has not kept pace with the explosion in global trading in the past decade. The FDA has 450 positions that oversee 20 million shipments. The Consumer Product Safety Commission does not have the authority to test toys and certify them as safe before they hit the shelves.

But safety is in everyone’s interest, and the Toy Industry Association is contemplating whether federal regulations are needed to close the gaps in the industry’s testing. The industry need only look at what happened to Canadian pet food supplier Menu Foods after the recall. It went from posting a $2 million profit last year to $3.6 million in losses so far this year.

Whatever the solution, consumers need to keep a close watch on recall lists to protect themselves. Visit www.cpsc.gov to sign up for recall alerts or to read the current list. Better truth-in-labeling laws may also need to be enacted, especially with food items, because it can be difficult to discern the country of origin.

On the whole, the expansion of global trade is a positive development, especially for a trade-dependent state such as Washington. But a continuing wave of tainted imports could turn Bongiorni’s book into a horror story.