Most of us have this stuff in our kitchens:
"Many Household Uses." Never mind their vagueness here, those are words for our times.
"Baking soda," or if you prefer its chemical name, "bicarbonate of soda," is a nice, simple molecule, both cheap and inert. It's not under patent anywhere. And, take my word for it, you can use baking soda for much of what you already buy specialized household- and personal-care products for.
For a sampling of the myriad, improbable "Household Uses" of baking soda, and a sense of the insurrectionary character of those "Uses," follow me below.
What could baking soda replace?
If many more people cleaned and washed with baking soda, the household products industry, including scouring powder, dish detergent, laundry detergent, and household cleaners of all kinds, could take a major hit. By some estimates, that industry is currently worth more than $50 billion a year, in the United States, alone. That doesn't even include the personal-care products market, e.g., shampoo and under-arm deodorant, which captures approximately another $250 billion per year, globally.
That's a lot of unnecessary perfumes and dyes. It's a lot of petrochemical ingredients, a lot of complex and sinister molecules, worrying our poor cells with repeated exposure, then sliding down the drain right into the water table. It's a lot of packaging stuffed into the landfill. Most of all, it's a heavy load of Madison Avenue propaganda, mainlined into our unfulfilled and passive consumer wits.
Talk about pollution.
Oligarchs cynically tend to our deepest longings as they sell us cleaning and personal-care products. Their ads lull us into buying their false promises of personal well-being, along with their products.
Here is a vintage Palmolive Soap commercial:
Whew! Now I can save my career and get a man, too. That girlfriend who recommends Palmolive Soap is a Delphic Oracle for those of us "under par." While she's at it, can she fix my pill-and-booze addiction? Or remedy the pervasive sexual inequality that defines my life?
Widespread use of baking soda, alone, could sever Madison Avenue's linkage of existential fulfillment to simple household cleaning and personal hygiene in the public mind. But that's not all.
First, a bit of history. Arm & Hammer has been the earliest and premier brand of baking soda, sold since the 1800s as a leavening agent for home baking. It seemed to clean and deodorize, too. Arm & Hammer, or the brand's parent corporation, has come out with specialized cleaning products, no doubt leveraging its brand's association with "basics" and "purity" in peoples' minds. But it has not marketed baking soda aggressively as the simplest "green" alternative to many household and personal-hygiene products, which it may well be.
It seems a curious omission. You think to yourself that Arm & Hammer has forfeited a big market. Then you hear about one person's "off-label" use of baking soda—mine—and it starts to make sense.
Personally, I've spent years "phasing out" scented cleaning and personal-hygiene products, and "phasing in" baking soda, or simple home mixes that use it. I'm not done yet. I expect to spend years more, tweaking and experimenting. This open-ended "cleaner-living" project has captured and held my fancy, for reasons discussed in this fascinating article, and more.
I'll use one instructive personal example: hair care. Since I started coloring my hair, shampooing it dried it to where I couldn't comb it, so I needed to apply conditioner after every shampoo. That was just too much chemical goop. So I gave up shampoo. My hair looked dreadful. But at least I could comb it without conditioner, without the comb breaking. I went online and found out that people who didn’t use shampoo, often used baking soda on their hair instead. Some people used a little, other people used a lot. But all reported that baking soda cleaned their hair. I tried a baking soda rinse on my dirty hair, and noticed an immediate improvement. This was last summer. Suffice it to say, I futzed around for another ten months, to find the "right" amount of baking soda to rinse with—not too little or too much—and the right stuff to mix with the baking soda, to make my hair shiny. Now I rinse my hair several times a week with a teaspoon of baking soda and 6-7 drops of lemon essential oil, dissolved in a cup of warm water. That's it. My hair is shiny and clean, it combs easily, and I haven't shampooed in a year.
That's one of the "Many Household Uses" of baking soda. But they can't sell baking soda especially for hair-care, because it isn't ready-made for that. When you begin substituting baking soda for shampoo, you futz around to find just the right amount to use, and so on, based on personal specifics. Same thing with other baking-soda substitutions: they afford no shortcuts for painstaking improvisation. But Madison Avenue likes instant solutions it can sell. Fed a steady diet of Madison Avenue promises from earliest childhood, we like those, too.
You see that preference asserting itself, even around politics, and even in this venue. "Hey, we thought we elected the right president. Why didn't that fix America?" Why do corporations still have so much influence in government?
We try to solve problems like that in this forum, on the drawing board, and then in real life. It's slow going because it's hard work.
So it goes beyond the need for "ready-made solutions" it can sell. The oligarchy, of which Madison Avenue is part, doesn't want us exploring the "Many Household Uses" of baking soda, for the same reason it hates our political self-help. It knows idealism, resourcefulness, curiosity, and persistence in little people just lead to trouble. You get long lines at voting places. And what about those demonstrations?