How to reduce hazardous products in your kitchen

The Incredible Shrinking Woman,is a movie that was made in the early 80s that was disguised as a sci-fi, comic fantasy. In reality, however, it was meant to be an environmental cry for help in freeing households from dangerous chemicals that have charred our skin, lungs, bloodstreams,and septic tanks since the early 50′s when enhanced cleaning products began to flood the market. The Shrinking Woman, played by Lily Tomlin, mixed just the wrong kitchen chemicals together, which began a shrinking process that could not be stopped.

Fortunately, there has never really been a case where anyone shrank away to nothing due to kitchen cleansers, but we must ask ourselves what these chemicals are doing to our bodies and our environment. We do get them on our skin and breathe them into our lungs. We do pour them down our drains and out into the world. And it is possible to do real and immediate damage to any of these things if we mix the wrong kitchen chemicals together. The one bright note in all of this is that we don’t HAVE to use any harmful kitchen cleansers in order to keep our kitchens clean.

To reduce (or eliminate) hazardous products in the kitchen is becoming easier and easier with the increasing number of environmental friendly companies. Companies like Seventh Generation make all kinds of cleansers and detergents that are effective in getting things clean but will not harm anyone. These products might cost a little bit more, especially since the best place to find them is at a natural foods grocery store such as Whole Foods Store or Wild Oats, but they are worth the money in the savings to our health. Of course, you can reduce costs while still reducing hazardous products if you utilize things in your kitchen that you wouldn’t normally think of as cleansers. Lemon juice makes a wonderful deodorizer and the acids in it can act as an antiseptic and antibacterial agent. You can mix a little lemon juice and vinegar into some baking soda and use it like you would use comet. If there is a stain on your counter top let a little bit of lemon sit on it for a couple of minutes and then add some baking soda and then scrub it up. Vinegar works as well and sometimes even better. If you don’t like the smell of vinegar, mix some lemon juice in and it neutralizes the vinegar odor and enhances it’s cleansing usefulness. Lemon juice can be used as a bleaching agent, but for an even more powerful substitute for bleach, hydrogen peroxide is useful and non-toxic.

These are a few ideas but of course there are a lot of other things you can do to reduce hazardous products in your kitchen. There are a number of books and magazines devoted to such subjects, not to mention websites that thoroughly exhaust the subject. There’s no need for us to stand in danger of shrinking for every hour that we work in the kitchen. We can clean like our ancestors did and our environment and our bodies will thank us for it.

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Tagged with: Comic Fantasy • Septic Tanks • Whole Foods