Earlier this week, the magazine Mother Jones posted a helpful little story on the question of whether the health-conscious consumer should wash organic produce. Was it necessary, the author pondered, after all "how bad could a little chemical-free dirt really be?"
I had a ready answer to that question: "Not bad at all," I shouted at the computer screen. "since it doesn't exist!" The howl brought my teenage son to the office door. "What's wrong?" he asked. Usually he rolls his eyes when I launch into one of my chemical-free rants. I think he's still recovering from the day I discovered that our local bakery advertised chemical free bread. "Mom," he begged me then, "let's just leave quietly."
But this time he just looked puzzled "How can you have dirt without chemicals?" he asked. Yes, Mother Jones, how? Because what is dirt but a wonderfully intricate mosaic of compounds, a beautifully detailed chemical archive of our planet's natural history. Because soils contain tiny particles of rocks, eroded to dust, theirchemistry variesaccording to location. So you may find elements like nitrogen, minerals like calcium and you may not. You will often find find naturally occurring metallic compounds such as aluminum oxide or iron oxide. You may find the famed chemistry of crystals, bits of quartz (silicon dioxide), for instance. You may find naturally occurring poisons such as arsenic trioxide, which likes to cluster close to the surface.
As you can tell from the "oxide" compounds that I've listed, planetary dirt is a testament to ability of oxygen to bind with the earth's essential elements. And dirt is also a testament to life on an oxygen-rich planet. It's full of organic compounds left by decomposing plants and animals. It provides a home to an infinity of microbes. When I was in graduate school, I took a soil science course. For years later, whenever I dug in the garden, I would think to myself in the geekiest way "Ihere goes the microbial zone." And I could go on here in the geekiest way but I don't think I need to write an encyclopedia to make my point.
It is also true that dirt can also offer up an archive of human activities, industrial compounds leaked from factories, pesticides (especially the long-lasting ones like lead arsenate). And it's the latter point, of course, that the Mother Jones article was trying to make. I do realize that the term "chemical-free" is just a marketing phrase, meant to assure consumers that toxic compounds have (supposedly) been eliminated. That's why when Johnson & Johnson recently announced that it was removing trace toxics, such as formaldehyde, from its shampoos and other products, the headline ended up being "Chemical-Free Make-Up, Shampoo, Baby Care on the Way from J&J".
In fact, what's left in a shampoo bottle is a litany of other chemicals. And, as a Johnson & Johnson spokesman pointed out to Time magazine that formaldehyde compound in the shampoo was so barely there that it posed no real risk. Formaldehyde, in fact, tends to form naturally in living cells in trace amounts. J&J calculated that it would take 14 bottles of shampoo to add up to the amount of the material in one apple. But, according to the magazine, "the company decided that this was simply too complicated and subtle a message to allay fears."
And this, folks, is exactly why I continue to rant about the phrase "chemical free." Yes, it started as a marketing term but it's become part of the common language. As such it oversimplifies, drowning out the more complicated realities. It wrongly suggests that only industrial chemicals are dangerous when, in fact, nature is very good at creating lethal poisons. It stokes our chemical fears and misdirects them.
And by fostering a fictional world view of chemistry, it makes us less safe, not more; less aware of the world around us, not more. Because the only place where you might find chemical-free dirt is in the gardens of your fairy-tale imagination. And that's not going to be all that useful back here on Earth.
Image: Fairy Tale Toadstool: Andy Potter/geograph.org.uk
