Bad chemistry in Ellesiouville, U.S.A.

I have written before of my neighbors. Generally speaking, our ideologies are more similar than dissimilar: our politics, child-rearing philosophies, and sociological concerns are the same. However, our positions on science and religion are so different that, unfortunately, we will never be able to be true friends.

Most recently, they have been discussing soap with Angry Baker. Angry Baker makes our soap. It is lovely stuff: usually superfatted, it is soft and lathers like a dream. It doesn't have the same perfectly formulated fragrance that a detergent bar has, but it is dirt cheap and not as harsh on the skin.

The making of soap requires the use of an alkali, usually NaOH (lye) for bar soaps. Here's where the problem comes in. Lye is, of course, a chemical, extraordinarily caustic even in low concentrations. According to my neighbors' logic, "chemicals" are bad, hence soap made with lye is bad.

Does soap have lye in it? Absolutely not. The process of saponification completely removes the alkali, leaving only fats and glycerin. But didn't Angry Baker just stir a whole can of lye into the soap? Yes. Then soap has lye in it. No. Such is the miracle of chemical reaction, which they can't (or refuse to?) understand.

They gave us a pamphlet, printed up by some local soapmaker, which proclaims loudly the fact that there are no "chemicals" in their soap. Well, of course there are chemicals in their soap: all substances are chemicals. But it's true that there is no lye in their soap, for the same reason that there is no lye in Angry Baker's soap. However, the pamphlet goes further, claiming that their soap was made without "chemicals," and this is just a lie. There is no way to make a bar of "soap" without an alkali or a detergent (which is worse, ecologically speaking, than the lye).

We had a similar argument a few months ago about bleached flour. Bleached flour is "bad," as we all have heard. But this is because most bleached flours are refined, not because they are bleached. We were sitting around a dinner table, and somehow the topic came up. Angry Baker had recently become interested in how flour was bleached, and attempted to explain that it was a benign process.^* In the middle of his description someone interrupted and exclaimed, derisively, that chlorine could not possibly be benign under any circumstances. It is, of course, a "chemical" that, when thrown about in large quantities, can make life miserable.

However, almost everything, in large enough quantities, can make life miserable. Water, for example, can kill in any number of ways. But life would not be possible without it, you argue? Well, life would be pretty tricky without chlorine, too. Chlorine is a component of common salt. Yes, chlorine is used to make mustard gas, but if we didn't have it, we wouldn't have salt. Among other minor functions, salt maintains the integrity of the cells of our bodies, keeps our hearts pumping, and makes our neurons fire. There would be no life on earth without chlorine.

This knee-jerk reaction to eschew any product whose manufacture was assisted by a "chemical" really bewilders me. There is a huge subculture devoted to consuming the all-natural, the organic, no-"chemical" product. Such products are marketed with lies, and cost twice as much as comparable products without the hype. I too try to purchase products that have a minimal impact on my environment, but this credulous bullshit makes me want to run to Walmart and buy a cartload of Raid Ant and Roach Killer. Doesn't anyone take chemistry in high school any more?

^*Benign with respect to the resulting flour. I have no idea if the process itself has any negative ecological impact. Edited to add: Bromate is the bleaching agent for flour, but my neighbor interjected his remark about chlorine anyway.