Natural Nontoxic Herbal Cleansers
Here’s a funny thing I happened on yesterday. Sort of happened – I was looking up the Dictionary because it’s being released in the US this month, so that’s why I saw this, but I happened on it now rather than a year ago, and that’s happening because Nick just mentioned Richard Carrier the other day and I put the article he mentioned in Flashback – quite unaware that he had written to Skeptical Inquirer about the Dictionary. So that’s amusing. To me.
But Richard Carrier’s letter is much more so.
I found it quite amusing to find the last page of Phil Mole’s review of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense (May/June 2005) making the correct observation that “natural often serves as a synonym for good, thereby implying that all natural herbal remedies are better than ‘artificial’ scientific” ones, then quoting the Dictionary’s lampooning of “herbs” as “natural, organic, pure, wholesome” and “much better because not chemical–chemicals, of course, are toxic.” Okay. Now look down on the very same page where you put the “Top Ten Best Sellers” in the science category. Look at number seven: The Naturally Clean Home: 101 Safe and Easy Herbal Formulas for Nontoxic Cleansers.” That hits the trifecta! Natural. Herbal. Toxic. A science best seller? I guess fashionable nonsense really is fashionable.
Hah! On the same page. Very cool.
Processed flaxseed? – don’t you
mean unprocessed, natural? This
is a healthfood shop, remember.
Well, no, not really – I prefer
it without the cyanide.
_____
Hah!
As it happens, I’ve flipped through that book. Synopsis, as I remember it: clean it with vinegar. Put herbs in so it doesn’t smell so much like vinegar. If if isn’t something you’d clean with vinegar, scrub it with baking soda. Put herbs in to make it smell nicer. In other words, do about what my grandmother would have done.
Getting 101 formulas out of something like that is something of an art, I suppose.
(But, needless to say, it’s unlikely to be a science.)
Sounds like a waste of perfectly good vinegar to me.
‘Getting 101 formulas out of something like that is something of an art, I suppose.’
Much as getting more than 500 entries out of fashionable nonsense was. We could have got more, too – we had to call a halt, and we left some on the cutting room floor. Which goes to show: FN is more fecund than vinegar and baking soda.
Wandering afield here, but actually, vinegar’s not as bad a cleaning agent as you might think. Many hardwood floor pros swear by it. And it’s almost ridiculously cheap, especially compared to “New! Improved! Dow *BLAMMO* Greez-Busta with Scrubbonium! Now in Godawful Floral Scent!” or whatever the latest junk on the shelves is.
It’s fashionably nonsensical in some quarters to clean with vinegar because it’s so pure and nontoxic, but it wasn’t so long ago that it was fashionably nonsensical to clean with the equivalent of *BLAMMO* because it was so exciting and newfangled. No doubt the fashion for overpriced space-age cleansers will be back. Though, in my opinion, no level of space-age technology can make cleaning the kitchen exciting.
No, I know – I use vinegar on wood floors (on the very rare occasions that I wash such things) meself. I also have vivid memories of using vinegar to clean the aluminum (? I think) sinks and counters of the dormitory kitchen when I was at university. (Then I swapped for a much more fun job in the dormitory’s snack shop place. Like working in a very miniature restaurant or coffee shop. I enjoyed that. I’m easily entertained.) I don’t think the people who managed the dormitory kitchens were terribly fashionable, and besides it was 1870, so the fashion was different. Vinegar, vinegar, and more vinegar, that was the style.
Oh, I should have been more clear – I was replying to Merlijn.
I thought they used Javelle water for everything in 1870. Your university must have been remarkably fashion-forward for its time.