So Uncus covered a neat story this week about the Cville public school systems going green, and by green I mean they will do away with traditional disinfectants and use soap and water or green products. While this idea seems promising and a major blow to our good ol’ buddies at P&G/Unilever/Johnson & Johnson etc, some residents are concerned about the efficacy of non-traditional cleaning products in protecting our children.
So this brought up the age-old Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest. Surely our bodies were meant to live in a world without 409 and Tilex, so who is telling us we need it? Wouldn’t it be better for all of us to be exposed to germs at an early age and let our bodies tough it out? Plus, if any of you have used “green” cleaning products like the Meyers line, you will no doubt have already fallen in love with the delicious smell of Hibiscus kitchen cleaner…if it weren’t that strong I would drink it, its that good. I say let kids learn good cleaning habits on their own and get sick. Kids these days are coddled way too much. Isn’t it strange to you that the experts quoted in the Uncus article claim children do not have good hand-washing practices? Really? I wonder why? Because according to the parents, they can get away with having poop all over their hands and clean it with anti-bacterial hand gel, YES! Wonderful idea. If kids at any age don’t know how to wash their hands with soap and hot water by now something is seriously wrong and nature should be allowed to take its course. Imagine a future employee greeting you on interview day with flies coating his shit stained hand, “Oh its cool dude, here is some cleaning gel!”. Yummy.
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Popularity: 51% [?]
I’ve been saying this for years. Kids may be the fittest to survive in an electronic world, but when that all does away, they’re dead, and I’ll live on. Suck it you “like” saying idiots. Learn how to wash yer hands, for christ’s sake. Then do it…. everytime you go to the bathroom.
Paging Ethan, Ethan to the green courtesy thread, please.
I had my children wrapped in industrial bubble wrap to protect them from germs, overly high playground equipment, exposed breasts and ungodly words.
@2- so, you don’t see them much, do you?
@3 Sure I do, they are right over there on the mantle listening to Fellowship Books on Tape. Its almost time for their anti microbial immersion therapy.
/precious little snowflakes
Hear Hear. The sanitizers just make the germs stronger or something. A smart geek told me that.
Scientology? (scary how this is part of the Firefox dictionary and MUST be spelled with a capital “S”)
Did you know the Blue Book company makes Green Books now? They’re made from recycled paper. Hey, it’s not that the old Blue Books weren’t, but now you can make the first page green and charge 10 cents more for it. Besides, who wants to show up to class with the only Blue Book when all of your classmates have green ones. Imagine the shame! Dirty earth killer.
@ 5 True. Antibacterial means ALL bacteria, and not all bacteria is bad.
@ 6 Whoah! Left field post of the month! You must be experience a high level of body thetans. I can fix that… for all of your money.
@7 I knew you’d turn up! Green makes ethan red with rage… its like christmas!
In my day, nobody made us wash our hands.
Look, I’m all for recycling, conserving natural resources, investing in renewable energy, investing money to clean up our waterways and such, but let’s be real. Most of these environmental products are just a scam. Green is a new religion. It’s like Scientology except that it’s a bigger scam because it’s more believable.
You know, I should be applauding these sorts of companies. They found a market to exploit. They’re as capitalist as they come, except that they make you feel good instead of pointing fingers and calling them evil. As a proponent of the free market, I applaud them for finding people to buy their products. In a way, they’re not very much different from the way Apple rebuilt their empire with the ipod. There were many other companies making mp3 players that were as good or better than the ipod, but Apple just marketed better. They created a campaign that made people feel ashamed and socially dejected for owning an mp3 player other than an ipod. That’s what Green is. It’s a group-think marketing movement to make the people who don’t buy organic food or drive SUVs or don’t have those toilets that save water by clogging your toilet when you take a shit.
I’m just jealous that I didn’t invest in these companies years ago. I could have made a lot of money.
7: Ethan, when you harp on the same note, it’s like recycling. Be very careful. I know you’d hate to recycle.
@10: I don’t think it’s that complicated. I think that people are starting to revert to a simpler way of life and realizing that simpler more natural things make sense. But yeah, there are people out there who figured out they could make money off of that.
In light of 10, 11 makes less sense. I reiterate my desire for a Preview Comment option. Damn.
What simpler way of life?
@14: Life before chemicals were used in/on everything
As far as I can tell, it’s more complicated to be “Green”. I could just throw all of my recycling and compostables into the same bag and have it hauled away, instead I have 3 containers for my trash. Also, I could drive to work everyday, instead riding my bike and having to pack extra clothes in case it rains. I could put rat poinson in the groundhog holes instead of waiting for my dog to catch ‘em and leave ‘em on the back porch. (Woohoo, we’re up to 4 for the summer, folks!)
@16: sounds like you buy a lot of stuff that comes in packaging you don’t or can’t re-use. Also, maintaining a bike is WAY easier/cheaoer than maintaining a car. You’re SOL with the groundhog though.
@15 Simpler does not necessarily mean better. In the days before chemical pesticides and fertilizers, a substantial portion of the annual crop was lost to pests or poor land. Farmers lost money and food cost more. Before chemical preservatives, there were fewer options in the grocery store. You know, in ancient times, when “plague” struck it was most often not a communicable disease like bubonic, but rather the large-scale spoiling of grains such as wheat. Cities might lose thousands or tens of thousands of people due to food poisoning. So now we use chemicals to preserve foods. Our standard of living is higher as a result.
@ 14 I know right? Lately this area has been practically saturated with dihydrogen monoxide. Take me back to the good old days!
@ 16 I need to borrow your dog.
@18: I’d rather lose some crops than have more people ending up with asthma and cancer. And is preservatives are so fecking awesome how come more products are advertising “No Added Preservatives!” today? They’re obviously able to sell some food that isn’t chemically preserved. And fewer options is fine if it means less crap.
Keep in mind that a farm subsidy program still exists which actually pays people NOT to farm on their land. I completely agree with what Ethan is saying about the higher yields and quality provided by chemicals. My point is that we could stand to produce much more product to ensure a higher volume of usable/acceptable product.
/Of course, the obvious fallacy of this argument is that it seems that most food contamination problems are not discovered until after the damage has been done.
Oh, I didn’t realize you were a farmer, shen. If you wish to lose crops to pests, that’s your own business decision to make!
My bad, you are right Ethan. Chemicals are awesome and should be in and on everything. They make the world a better place and have no downside.
I put sodium chloride on my cucumbers before I eat them.
/we, and everything that is, is made of chemicals. just sayin.
Sometimes I poop carbon. Should I call a doctor?
Buckyballs? Because that would be awesome!
With regard to the agri-babble going on, I would suggest reading Amartya Sen’s Developement as Freedom. Sen argues (among other thigns) that we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the globe, and that famines and food shortages are always a distribution problem and thus, preventable. A good read.
I’d much rather have asthma than die of food poisoning. In fact I’d wish that on just about everyone. There’s chemicals in everything. Maybe you shouldn’t drink water. Tap water is cholorinated and flourinated. It’s also treated with soda ash and lime for softening, and many other chemicals, too. This is the same water you use for drinking and bathing (I hope). I reccomend untreated water for anyone who thinks chemicals are bad.
If the world stopped chemically treating food, there wouldn’t be enough for everyone, and even more people would die. Weigh the consequences.
And, while we’re on the subject, genetically enhancing vegetables is just like speeding up evolution. Those resistant to bugs and that grow faster will be the ones that survive.
Now, a chicken with four breasts is different. If I had a chicken with four breasts, I’d eat that one first.
I read this article recently (National Geographic?) where this guy had a complete chemical analysis of his body done. Of course it cost like $5000 (which natgeo paid for) but it showed levels of different chemicals in him, what was normal, and possible reasons for the high levels of those chemicals. The area he grew up in, eating foods covered in plastic wrap, or contained in plastics or certain metals, etc. Basically I think even if you eat your organically grown vegetables straight from the garden you’re ingesting chemicals. It’s just a matter of which ones can really harm you.
AH! Found the article.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0610/feature4/index.html?fs=www3.nationalgeographic.com&fs=plasma.nationalgeographic.com
genetically enhancing vegetables is just like speeding up evolution.
Well, that is our assumption. We’re not exactly sure what the long term consequences are. Not saying there will be problems, just saying that no one knows.
You can get food poisonign from pesticides. Or from some cook with crap on his hands just grabbing some hand sanitizer instead of washing them.
Sure, you can get food poisoning from pesticides. But it’s unlikely that you do after washing them. My parents had a garden for most of my life and my dad always used pesticides. If he didn’t, we wouldn’t have had a garden because weevils and Japanese beetles would have decimated it. None of us got sick. Pesticides have been tested and are harmless in minimal (parts per million) doses. I’ll take the slight risks of contamination from potentially harmful chemicals rather than mass bacterial infection of grain in simpler, ancient times that wiped out tens of thousands of people at a time.
Which brings us back to the point of this original article. If the “green” solution was better at killing bacteria, it would have been adopted long ago and not been replaced by “chemical” cleaners such as Lysol.
The fact of the matter is we can’t go back to a simpler life. Was life simpler before electricity and the industrial revolution? Maybe to a degree, but life was also much more harsh. Starvation was more common, people lived in uncomfortable environments. Humans were more susceptible to disease. People lived into their 40’s and 50’s. Infant mortality was higher. A dream of a simpler life is naive. While some of us wish for it, the rest of the “simpler” people in the undeveloped world would do anything to live in the more complicated and toxic America.
I think chemical cleaners like Lysol were invented because they “seemed” to do a faster better job than more natural solutions. But there are side effects. A sociology study showed that people buy cleaners with Sodium Lauryl Sulfate because it makes more bubbles and they think bubbles = better cleaning! But SLS is pretty bad for you. Lysol and bleach and most chemical cleaners contain very toxic stuff but might seem like they’re doing a better job than good old baking soda or vinegar.
We can go back to a simpler life, and I don’t mean going back to the Middle ages or Third World or the Thunderdome or whatever it is you’re picturing. It’s easy. Eat local produce or grow your own. Walk more, drive less. Write letters. Wrap your sandwich up in a linen napkin instead of using a Ziplock bag. Wash your hands. Let kids play out side and get dirty and climb trees. That’s what I mean be being simpler, more natural.
come on people, you’re all smarter than this. This is not some either/or scenario where we either have chemicals and they kill or we don’t have them and we die of horrible starvation.
We had a revolution in agriculture where we found we could get higher yields with the aid of certain man-made devices, some of which are chemicals, some of which are machines and techniques. We now know some chemicals and techniques are crazy dangerous and that the mass production of engineered food sets us up for a big FAIL.
Extrapolating from all this, we come up with phase 3 which takes the best of both eras and when combined with improved medical care (good chemicals!) keeps us healthy and well fed and the earth is happy.
/wash your hands!
Oh shit, I think I may be a hippie.
@33: yes.
I think chemical cleaners like Lysol were invented because…
Oh come on now. We all know why Lysol was invented.
/ah, the good old days.
If he didn’t, we wouldn’t have had a garden because weevils and Japanese beetles would have decimated it
Actually, under the strictest of definitions, you’d still have nine-tenths of your original garden. But now I’m just picking nits.
I kill nits with quell. I also put quell on my salad.
@37
Wow. Thank you for that link. That one goes into the trivia files.
@37 holy shit. I changed my mind. chemicals are bad.
@37: WTF???!!! I am not putting Lysol anywhere near my va jay jay.
It was part of a national ad campaign. To be fair, they were going up against Zonite (whatever that is, probably bleach).
/heh. “grave womanly offense”.
Our early “better living through chemistry” experiences were so spot on, I am sure our early experiences with genetic modification will just go swimmingly.
/i promise not to dip into the thalidomide files.
@33,35 hippies smoke crack!
http://www.cgfi.org/2001/06/02/the-deadly-chemicals-in-organic-food/
It’s not easy being green.
@45: I think you smoke crack.
@46: That shit is in those flea collars you get at the store too. Do not buy flea collars form the grocery store ya’ll. Unless you like watching little Fluffy have convulsions.
@46 - You’re making a joke, right? Dennis Avery, the director of CGFI, is also the author of “Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming”. Check this out:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Trashing_organic_foods
Gosh, I wonder how CGFI is funded….
@16, 19.
Groundhogs=rabies vectors.
Don’t go kissin on your dog if you keep that shit up. ugh.
Groundhogs != rabies vector, usually. Groundhogs = broken horse leg vector.
Instead beware little fluffy…
random internet quote………………….
Where rabies is found: Human rabies is quite rare in the United States. Only 27 cases have been reported in people in the United States since 1990.
Raccoons are the most common wild animals infected with rabies in the United States. Skunks, foxes, bats, and coyotes are the other most frequently affected.
# Bats are the most common animals responsible transmission of human rabies in the United States.
# Cats are the most common domestic animals with rabies.
# Almost any wild or domestic animal can potentially get rabies, but it is very rare in small rodents (rats, squirrels, chipmunks) and lagomorphs (rabbits and hares). Large rodents (beavers, woodchucks/groundhogs) have been found to have rabies in some areas of the United States.