For a Greener Kitchen: Annie Bond and Home Enlightenment
by Cait Johnson
These days, people are making the connection between what we eat and our health: you can find organically-grown produce in all the local supermarkets, and the health food stores in Rhinebeck and Red Hook are doing a brisk business. But what many folks don't know is that the products we use in our kitchens—the antibacterial soaps and sprays, the coated pans, the dishwashing detergents laden with artificial fragrances—may be posing a risk to both personal and environmental health. The great news is that it is both simple and inexpensive to eliminate these products and make your kitchen a greener, healthier place.
"People have been intimidated into thinking that only chemicals will keep our kitchens clean," says Annie Bond, the internationally-known "Clean and Green" maven who also happens to live in Rhinebeck. "Advertising scares us into thinking we'll harm our families if we don't use chemical products and instead we're harming them because we do." The news is peppered with stories about new links between chemicals found in many household cleaners and hormone disruption or even cancer; people are beginning, rightly, to suspect that many commercial products may not be safe for us to use. But that doesn't mean you can't have a gloriously clean and healthy kitchen. If you want to know how easy it is—and how much better you and your family will feel—just ask Annie Bond.
Annie came by her knowledge about non-toxic, chemical-free housekeeping the hard way: she was poisoned in 1980, first by a gas leak in a restaurant that sent 80 people to the hospital, and then when her apartment was treated with a pesticide that has since been taken off the market. This double whammy resulted in full-blown multiple chemical sensitivities. "It basically turned me into a bubble case for eight years," she says. "It's a kind of domino effect when the central nervous system is damaged: your immune system just breaks down. I had to figure out how not to keep being re-exposed to chemicals. It was either that or feel terrible all the time." Annie and her family moved ten times in ten years trying to find a place where she could feel well, and finally landed in a beautiful house in the woods just outside of Rhinebeck village. She brought with her all of her tried-and tested formulas for keeping the home clean and healthy without chemicals.
"The first and simplest thing you can do to limit your exposure to chemicals," says Bond, "is to avoid synthetic fragrances. It's easy to find cleaning products at the health food store that aren't laced with perfumes." We also need to be wary of products that claim to "kill germs," or that say "antibacterial." Triclosan, the chemical ubiquitous to these products, has been banned in Scotland because of its link to creating resistant strains of bacteria. "It's exactly like what we're seeing with the over-prescription of antibiotics, " says Annie.
The safest and least expensive route toward a greener kitchen is making your own products using just a few ingredients that really work, but are eco-friendly and harmless. For instance, Annie swears by vinegar to kill germs and mold. When I had a nasty black-mold bloom in my house, I tried Annie's directive of spraying it with straight vinegar—and the mold simply disappeared. Impressive as this was, it was her soft scrubber formula that really turned me into a devout believer.
Like many of you, I suspect, I had been taught by my mother to use a chlorine-based cleanser to scrub the kitchen sink and the bathtub. I can remember countless instances over the years of kneeling beside the tub feeling pale and wan, chemical fumes in a cloud around my head, unable to summon up much elbow grease and thinking I must just be too lazy to attack that bathtub ring properly. Then Annie showed me how to make her famous soft scrubbing formula—which couldn't be cheaper or easier to make. It also smells good. Miraculously, it gets rid of bathtub ring and kitchen-sink scuzzies in a flash. And, importantly, I feel great when I use it; it has literally changed forever the way I feel about cleaning. See the sidebar for the recipe.
Annie Bond's latest book, Home Enlightenment: Keeping Home in the Twenty-First Century, is more than just a cornucopia of easy, non-toxic formulas to use throughout the home or, as the publishers describe it, "practical, earth-friendly advice for creating a nurturing, healthy, and toxin-free home and lifestyle." It is a heart-centered look at keeping a home in balance. Home Enlightenment will be out from Rodale Press in August. And if you want to see more great non-toxic home keeping tips, go to www.care2.com/channels/lifestyle/home and check them out. You can also sign up for free newsletters on keeping a healthy home, as well as recipes for seasonal vegetarian cooking, at www.care2.com.
