Natural and organic
Two annoying things.
- In the EU there are over 2000 products banned from cosmetics, ‘cos of the damage they cause to people, animals and the environment. In America, of those banned products there are just 36.
- My skin appears to responds better to face cream made from beeswax and oil than anything else I can buy off the shelf.
I find both these things depressing for very different reasons. Firstly, the things we as a species do to ourselves in pursuit of beauty, youth and… well, no, those two mostly… makes me a little bit sad. We also do things to our environment in this cause which are just offensive. Water polluted; animals experimented on. I’m not an animal rights activist, as I think the arguments on both sides are complicated, but if you’re gonna do anything to a rabbit, please don’t do it in the name of lipstick.
Then there’s the whole conversation about ‘natural’ products. Sure, we evolved within a certain biosphere, and evolution has had longer than Pfizer to get these things right. I understand and respect how our digestive tracts are ideally geared up towards the consumption of raw vegetables, and how playing in a dirt as a kid is probably a good idea for bolstering the immune system. We are a part of nature, though sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, and nature, with your vasty complexity and massively elegant co-dependencies, I salute you.
Know what else is part of nature? Fungal yeast infections. Mitochondrial decay. Warts. Cataracts. Deadly nightshade, poisoned mushrooms, raccoon scent glands. Locust swarms and potato blight. Tetanus. For all that I love and respect nature, I got no romance about this stuff. It’s fine to celebrate the wonder of natural things, but also worth footnoting how high child and mother mortality rates were until recent times, and how hearty outdoor living in yea olde times often lead to death by 35. We are urged to eat organic, shun GM, and no one mentions the swing of this argument, that while genetic modification may feel scary and risks plunging us into the unknown, crop failure and mass starvation are problems now that we don’t really wanna play with. Nature is glorious and wonderful. Nature sucks totally.
Penicillin and aspirin were both developed from organic products – a fungus and a bark – but they changed the way we live our lives, sometimes the fact we can live at all, through human tinkering. The vast majority of ‘unnatural’ products fall into this camp – something that’s been tinkered with, to make it more useful for humans. We pull the active ingredients out of stuff which otherwise might be pure poison, and can now do heart operations under anesthetic, make new structures and tools, cure earache and eradicate smallpox, saving millions of lives. And it’s perhaps this sense of it – this notion that humanity has looked at nature and tried to find ways to make it more helpful and less blister-inducing/liver-failure prone – that means I’m down with non-natural products. I’m down with following up on what a great many clever minds have distilled, because frankly if you can arrange this mess of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen particles into something that both fixes my teeth without giving me stomach cramps, that’d be amazing. Fundamentally it’s all just an assemblage of chemicals, and I will not imbue any romanticism into this truth.
Of course commerce has a vested interest in imbuing this debate with meaning, mostly bullshit meaning. Organic goods are trumped as being so much better for you than an ordinary apple, at three times the cost; laboratory-tested hair dye has been clinically proven (in a study of 12 people where 80% agreed) to be more effective than anything else out there! We are bombarded with nonsense-language attempting to highlight just how clever/organic/highly tailored/richly imbued with the rhythms of nature product X is, and with our choices there is an implied lifestyle being sold. We are defining ourselves by our purchasing choices, and boy, isn’t marketting excited to know it. Certainly in my corner of London, there is a very strong emphasis on a lifestyle that is ‘organic’. Organic fruits (flown in from the other side of the world but shussssshhh…) organic baby formula organic fabrics organic yoghurt organic medicine alternative medicines yoga and aromatherapy and an extra £10 to have your beans ground up before you by an organic hand and so on and so forth.
Piece by piece this is all fine and dandy. Well, no, the alternative medicines part makes me tense, but that’s a different rant. As an environmentalist I’m down with most of it as basically harmless/mildly aspirational; as someone a wee bit worried about social exclusion it pisses me off that food and diet have become another way of distinguishing between them (no time/cash to exercise, no time/cash to cook hearty nutritional food) and us (my yoga pants are made of hemp). Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong at all with going organic, so long as you’re ok with the notion that sometimes chemotherapy is more useful than aubergine in cancer treatment and that while you might be ok paying £3.50 for a sack of flour, most of us are gonna go for the 80p job despite the fact there might not be an authentically natural caterpillar corpse inside.
In all things, we find ways to judge each other. Science-acolytes (which I am, in my ignorant way) dismiss people for believing in the healing power of crystals, and sure, I don’t believe in the healing power of crystals, but that’s no excuse to dismiss people. At the same time, natural-living gurus dismiss science as only working for a corporate cause, some mysterious conspiracy of people paid by the control group, perhaps, and tut and say ‘I can’t believe you’re eating that’.
Dudes: we’re all right and we’re all wrong, pretty much like always, and absolutes don’t seem to get us anywhere.
Which brings me back to my second disappointing fact – that my skin seems to react best to face goo made of beeswax. So I’ve had acne pretty much as long as I can remember, as my Dad did before me and it’s annoying and sometimes makes me sad, in as much as body image shit gets to us all even at the best of times. I’ve tried loads of things – eating well, exercising muchly, washing my face with soap, without soap, with special formulas, with organic formulas, moisturising, not moisturising, the whole shazam. It still fluctuates a bit, but after much experimentation I am forced to concede that things are better when I use a pot of goo that I make at home in my candle-making, face-goo making saucepan (because I hate how much candle wax is wasted – Michael Faraday would be sad) and it’s basically oil and wax all the way down. Fancy formulas don’t work; in some there’s components that irritate my skin and make it worse.
And so I use organic face goo, and have to explain that I make my own, and even as I do this, I feel this urge to add a footnote – ‘but yeah, no, I don’t make my own because I think it’s better or nothing, I mean, it is for my skin, but it’s not like making your own is always correct, like everyone’s bodies are different and I’ve had a few years to experiment with this shit and learn what works and if there was a shop-bought equivalent which cost no more than my current method and achieved the same if not better effects I’d be down with it it’s not about being organic or anything I’m not a wanker honestly!’
See how I got judgment issues too? Oh boy have I got judgment issues….
I judge people who talk to me about how they only use natural and organic products, because I don’t think an absolute approach to anything makes any sense, especially in this modern age where technology could potentially lift us up to a new way of living. I judge myself when I use these things too, in case I’m buying into a marketted lifestyle rather than the best thing at the most reasonable price for myself. I am judged, occasionally, by advocates of organic living for my carbon footprint and choices. I judge those who reject organic products outright, for being numpties who need to be doing more testing before making these calls.
Ultimately, these calls shouldn’t be about lifestyle; it should be about what works best for you, society and the environment. And I have yet to see anyone find a way to walk that tightrope yet.
