Putting a Stanford Chemical Engineering Degree to Good Use

In 2002, I still thought organic milk and organic vegetables sounded weird. Were they like... dirty? Now I think food is kind of scary, because what we call "food" should be called "chemical, hormone, antibiotic, pesticide food" and what we call "organic food" should be called "food."

My mom points out for the less observant, do you notice you can often taste chlorine in your vegetables? Apparently, this has been getting worse over time. But if you have grown up eating chlorine vegetables for much of your life, you probably don't even notice it. We noticed that the vegetables in China tasted very good fifteen years ago, but we thought that was because of the natural fertilizer. So anyway, organic food has to include the washing, handling, storing, and packaging.

On the heels of organic food comes non-toxic and environmentally friendly cleaning products, still sort of weird-sounding, but it's time for a breakthrough.

Seventh Generation Free & Clear Dishwashing Liquid took second place in Cook's Country magazine dishwashing liquid tests. The top two winners were the two environmentally friendly brands. I hadn't heard of the magazine before, but according to the Seventh Generation blog, their product is also showing up in the kitchen scenery of cooking shows such as Rachael Ray. If I were in normal health, this would make me actually go out and buy some to try.

I had seen the products in Whole Foods Market and checked out their Web site several years ago but never bought any of their products, for lack of clear information on how surfactants produced from vegetable oil are better than surfactants produced from petroleum. Is it just the renewability of the source material? Obviously, "vegetable-based surfactants" are no longer actually vegetables. The Web pages sort of jumble the topics of toxic substances and renewable sources. Even though they say their products are less toxic, they don't actually say that it's from using vegetable oil instead of petroleum. It seems to be because of avoiding other ingredients that are in most cleaning products.

We are reversing many of the trends of the last fifty years. Shopping without plastic and paper bags, how does that work? But that was normal not that long ago. Organic food, yeah, that used to be normal. And they used to make soap out of animal fat and lye in Little House on the Prairie. Is this going back to the future, or forward to the past?

I'm just now reading about the first place winner of the dishwashing liquid tests, a brand I hadn't heard of before. It's rather new, and one of the founders is a Stanford alum. Method is hip. Even the bottles are beautiful. They list all of their ingredients. Go check it out.