Greening Your Family: A Reference Guide to Safe Food, Personal Care, and Cleaning Products
By Cate Hennessey
Greening Your Family: A Reference Guide to Safe Food, Personal Care, and Cleaning Products, by Lindsey Carmichael. Peter E. Randall, 2009.
Slow Death by Rubber Duck convincingly argues that common products like plastic containers, fragranced beauty products, and antibacterial coatings are pickling our bodies with toxic chemicals.
Grow Your Own Drugs teaches you how to make herbal remedies and personal care items so you can avoid those noxious chemicals.
But Lindsey Carmichael’s Greening Your Family: A Reference Guide to Safe Food, Personal Care, and Cleaning Products is probably the best book for busy families who want to make better choices about everything from laundry detergent to sunscreen.
The book is as sensible as its name, a compact reference for those who would prefer to buy all-natural than make their own. For each type of product it mentions – everything from meat to baby wipes to glass cleaner – Carmichael presents a brief overview of the typical chemicals found in them and how the chemicals have been linked to health problems. In this regard, Greening Your Family is a valuable abridged version of Slow Death by Rubber Duck.
Even more importantly, following the scientific background of each product are charts of safer national brands, individual product names, and important notes or cautions. In short, this provides consumers with a quick and helpful alternative to reading the small print on every label.
But readers should note that Carmichael labels the brands as safer, not safe. Even products marketed as all-natural can contain less-than-desirable substances, so some all-natural products are better than others.
To help consumers make even more informed decisions, Carmichael returns several times to the work of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), particularly its Cosmetic Database, as a place for consumers to research personal care products before purchasing them. It’s an intriguing and user-friendly resource that rates products on their safety; it also receives consistent updates.
Particularly useful this time of year is the EWG’s sunscreen guide. Who knew that the sunscreens we use to prevent skin cancer often contain phthalates (linked to asthma, allergies, and problems with male genital development) and parabens (which interfere with the endocrine system)? The sunscreen guide provides a handy list of the safest sunscreens, as well as links to buy those products online.
All in all, using the EWG databases in conjunction with Greening Your Family is possibly the best and easiest way to feel good about what’s going into the products – and therefore the bodies – in your home.
Grow Your Own Drugs: Easy Recipes for Natural Remedies and Beauty Fixes
By Cate Hennessey
Grow Your Own Drugs: Easy Recipes for Natural Remedies and Beauty Fixes, by James Wong. Reader’s Digest. 2009.
After reading Slow Death by Rubber Duck, I considered making my own personal products; then I’d have no doubt about what went into my kids’ body wash. Plus, my girls love helping in the kitchen. We could make soap in lieu of chocolate chip cookies.
In my quest for recipes, I found James Wong’s Grow Your Own Drugs.
The title raised my eyebrows at first. Was Wong suggesting I grow poppies and certain species of mushroom in my garden? Add to this a bright, cartoonish cover and rather corny photos of the author sprinkled throughout the book, and I was hesitant about what Grow Your Own Drugs had to offer.
Like some plants, though, the beauty of the book is in its substance rather than its appearance. Wong, an ethnobotanist trained at the UK Royal Botanical Gardens – Kew, quickly establishes himself as a scientist well-versed in the medicinal properties of plants, and many of the ingredients in his recipes have gone through clinical trials that prove their effectiveness.
In short, Wong is passionate about the usefulness of plants – so passionate, in fact, that he hosts a popular BBC show of the same title as his book. Several episodes are available on YouTube, and they’re a good introduction to what to expect of Wong’s book: highly informative and presented in straightforward yet inspiring terms.
The recipes in Grow Your Own Drugs range from simple to complex; some include breath-sweetening spray, insect deterrent, and deodorant (all natural versions of which can be difficult to find in your everyday supermarket). In addition, Wong’s formulas for preventatives and restoratives sound as delicious as they are helpful. Goji berry and shiitake mushroom soup acts as an immune system booster; a kiwi smoothie with honey, salt, and feverfew flowers eases a hangover.
Many of the ingredients can be grown in your own garden, and Wong encourages readers to do so (garlic is his favorite plant for its ease of growing and versatility of use, as I learned from his interview with NPR). But if you don’t grow your own, many of the plants, herbs, and fruits can be purchased locally or found at the supermarket; one of his staples, beeswax, can be found through any of the local beekeepers profiled in a previous post.
For the more obscure elements, Wong includes a helpful resource directory with web and snail mail addresses. These hard-to-find ingredients, as well as the essential oils, can be pricey for those who just want to dabble with a few recipes , however. The up side is that many oils have a reasonable shelf life, so the investment may well be worth it for people who regularly brew their own remedies.
Though I found Wong’s book fascinating – especially the index of his top 100 medicinal plants, which includes other recipes not found in the main pages – I knew that replacing most of my household products with homemade ones would take time. That meant I’d have to save experimentation for the slower summer months. So what to do about my bathroom closet in the meantime?
The search was on for another solution, at least until my herb garden was at its peak and my mail order ingredients (like the pine resin for deodorant) arrived.
Tomorrow, I’ll share the best overall book for lowering the amount of chemicals that come into your home.
Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things
It’s summer reading week at ccdwell!
Check in each day for Cate’s detailed, honest book reviews on just-published eco-books (2009-2010). Friday’s post is a list of must-reads that includes categories from the best of poetry to the best in kid’s environmental books, as well as more non-fiction, cookbooks and fiction.
By Cate Hennessey
Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things, by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie. Counterpoint. 2009.
When our daughters were infants, my husband and I spent one night a week making baby food. In the small kitchen we often bumped into each other, and the cleanup stretched toward midnight. But we enjoyed knowing where the food came from and what was in it.
We never thought about what we heated and served the baby food in, though. And we never thought about the plastic sippy cups or the lavender-scented baby wash or the nonstick saucepan or my husband’s wrinkle-resistant shirts.
But we should have. As of this writing, President Obama’s Cancer Panel has just released a report which states that chemicals in the environment bear a large burden for the increases in cancer.
The report backs up one of the most recent and thorough books on the subject, Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things. Authors Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie argue that harmful, unregulated chemicals leach from common objects into our bodies and the environment. For example, phthalates and parabens – both commonly found in personal care products – act as hormone disrupters, and these chemicals may well be responsible for devastating conditions like autism, asthma, and infertility. Other chemicals, like the triclosan used in antibacterial soaps and coatings, are known carcinogens.
Worried about their families’ health, Smith and Lourie set out to discover just how easy it is to absorb and elevate the levels of seven high-risk chemicals into their bodies. So they lock themselves in a condo for several days and undertake what they call “normal” activities, like microwaving soup in plastic containers, feasting on tuna, bathing with fragranced products, using anti-bacterial hand soap, and hanging out on a couch freshly applied with Stainmaster.
They test their blood and urine again, which consistently show chemical levels increased beyond their expectation.
The increase in chemical levels is sobering, if not disturbing, and it makes the reader wonder just how much of the same chemicals have built up in their own body over years instead of just 4 days. Unfortunately the experiment goes to a few extremes; eating eight servings of tuna in 4 days and plugging air vents so as to inhale even more Stainmaster fumes probably don’t “mimic real life.”
Likewise, some readers may well be critical of Smith and Lourie’s agenda; after all, the authors make no secret of their careers as environmental activists. But overall, Smith and Lourie gain credibility through extensive research: they contextualize the chemicals and their experiment within environmental, legal, and medical history; contemporary sources include pediatricians, major corporations, government officials, and scientists; and case studies of citizens whose health and livelihoods have been threatened by chemical pollution illustrate real-world consequences.
In short, Smith and Lourie’s homework pays off, and their compilation of decades of environmental and medical research is valuable in its own right.
Slow Death concludes as a hopeful and proactive book. It shows how far we’ve come since the environmental disasters of 1960s, like the poisoning (and eventual rebirth of) Lake Erie. The authors also suggest that public support for a safer environment will move governments to ban or at least better regulate what goes into your kids’ toys and even your garden hose.
In that same spirit of optimism, the last chapter, “Detox,” offers a host of helpful, relatively simple solutions for lowering the presence of chemicals in your home. A preview: research toys before buying at Healthytoys.org; replace your PVC shower curtain with one made of natural fibers; avoid canned white albacore tuna; use glass instead of plastic baby bottles.
But more than anything, Slow Death convinced me to purge my bathroom of everything from the shaving cream to the tub cleanser. My only hesitation was that modern personal hygiene and housekeeping require a few necessities. How was I going to get a hold of products I felt good about using?
My first thought: go the same route as the baby food and make my own.
Check back tomorrow to find out about an ethnobotanist from the United Kingdom who’s been turning heads with his recipes for home-made, all-natural beauty products and remedies.
A Taste of Heaven
By Cate Hennessey, Guest Contributor
A Taste of Heaven: A Guide to Food and Drink Made by Monks and Nuns, by Madeline Scherb
After the holidays, as the cold sharpens, even the kitchen can take on a gray cast. I’m restless. I want something new. I want to travel.
This year I found a perfect antidote for deep winter blues: Madeline Scherb’s A Taste of Heaven: A Guide to Food and Drink Made by Monks and Nuns. Much more than a recipe collection, the book acts as a doorway into the sustainable world of monastic communities, as well as the beer, wine, cheeses, breads, chocolates, cheesecakes, and other delicacies produced by them.
The book’s four sections, Celestial Spirits, Holy Cheese, Sweet Temptations, and Other Edifying Edibles, provide historical context on individual monasteries, the labor that sustains them, and the products that result from the labor.
Recipes then follow, and each includes at least one of the ingredients discussed in the section. For example, the Holy Cheese section includes a profile of Gethsemani Abbey in Genesee, New York; the accompanying recipe for Spinach Crepes calls for Gethsemani Abbey cheese. (The crepes, by the way, are creamy and delicious; the cheese is very mild, and the nutmeg in the cream sauce completes the dish.)
the book acts as a doorway into the sustainable world of monastic communities, as well as the beer, wine, cheeses, breads, chocolates, cheesecakes, and other delicacies produced by them.
Just as exciting as the recipes and the history are the suggested travel itineraries for those interested in visiting the monasteries in person. Some of the foods featured in the book (like olive oil from Ganagobie Abbey in Provence) can only be purchased by visiting the monastic community that produce them, and Scherb writes about these places and products with such reverence that I am more than tempted to book a plane ticket to Europe. (more…)
