Family wellness doesn’t just mean looking after their health, but sorting out the wellness of the environment your family lives in. This means your home and looking out for the wellbeing of your planet and many people have turned to ‘natural’ cleaning products as a way of doing this.
Noah Garfinkel was reluctant to let go of harsh and dangerous chemicals in favour of natural products, as he says he believes in the cleaning strength of chemicals: ‘I want my cleaning products to be able to kill me along with any other smaller organisms that might be living rent-free in my apartment’. Nevertheless, he decided to try the cleaning power of baking soda.
Garfinkel claims that, aside from baking, the two uses of baking soda are cleaning and deodorising, and the latter ‘works really well’. Garfinkel says ‘I am constantly chopping garlic and onions, and even after washing my cutting boards with soap and water; they seem to retain at least a little odour. Baking soda took care of that in just a couple of minutes.’ Garfinkel simply sprinkled the soda on his cutting board and rinsed shortly after to get his odour-free results and says you can ‘use it on whatever’.
However, Garfinkel says he had ‘mixed results’ when it came to using baking soda for cleaning and scrubbing: ‘First, I tried using baking soda to scrub my bathtub because I was long overdue for a bathtub cleaning’ Garfinkel admits, and this ‘worked out reasonably well. I don’t know if there’s anything about the chemical makeup of baking soda that made it effective. It seemed to work about as well as any abrasive powder would.’ However, the baking soda did not remove a stain from a pool of shower water around Garfinkel’s drain.
Garfinkel also tried to use baking soda to make toothpaste, mixing six parts baking soda with one part hydrogen peroxide. He says ‘It was horrifying. It was truly terrible. It tasted like I poured a salty poison over a 9-volt battery and then licked it. Actually, that’s not quite vivid enough. Let’s try again. It tasted like the melting face of a troll. I immediately spit it out and brushed my teeth with real toothpaste.’
So maybe baking soda isn’t the toothpaste or cleaner to end all toothpastes and cleaners, but when it comes to stubborn smells and un-stained showers, maybe it’s the way to go for family wellness.
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