By Tony Dweck
It has always been a mystery as to why anybody should want to form a liaison and association between their sophisticated skin care product made lovingly in a clean sterile environment with a carrot grown in the mud.
Organic is almost perceived by marketers as being a legal term or condition, but it is not. The law has not found time to even describe what is natural let alone what is organic. Anybody can issue a certificate that says it is organic and charge for a logo, the only piece of legislation that covers this area is the Trade Descriptions Act.
The future of this organic trend lies in the foundations of the certification bodies. It is hugely disappointing that organisations seen as being the pioneers of safety and natural have banned parabens, which are not only found in nature but have been completely vindicated as safe by yet another comprehensive review. However, they still allow the totally synthetic preservative phenoxyethanol that even the good Lord himself would not recognise since it is in none of his flora. Please do not tell me they thought it was phenyl ethyl alcohol (found in rose oil)!
We rural types living between a pig farm on one side, horse on the other and have cows nearby know all about the delights of muck-spreading and the sweet aroma that it has. These are all put on top of your organic crops, potentially together with pig’s bristles, blood produced on the farm, with horn and hoof meal from slaughtered animals (and all we are pleased to report are organic). Battery manure from chickens, slaughterhouse waste is also all permitted.
Pests are always a nuisance and modern science provides effective specific and safe pesticides to protect the crops, except that if you are organic you have to rely on pesticides like derris, nicotine, pyrethrum (merciless in its kill rate), ryania etc., that are not only extremely toxic but have no specificity at all and will kill everything from ladybirds to bees and heaven help us if they escape into the water courses because the aquatic toxicity is high. The very reason man turned to science.
However, to put all this negativity aside, the foundations of organically certified has to be on the basis of truth and honesty. Water that falls out of the sky is not organic, but water that has been used to make steam and passed over a lot of flower petals and then condensed is organic. That is good, so distilled water must be organic – sadly not. So here is a good trick! Buy the Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice Powder (organically certified) at 200x strength and put the water back so it is 1:1 concentration Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice who can tell the difference? The alternative is just to accidentally thin down the Rosa Centifolia Flower Water with a bit of extra water.
We all know that some oil-bearing plants produce butters and I have found over 200 oil bearing plants with some of them not being oils but butter because of their fatty acid profiles. Imagine the surprise when an oil plant suddenly appeared on the market as a butter. Twenty years of research into the composition of these oily materials wiped out in an instance, how could we have missed four butters? They had to be genuine because they were certified organic. It was then that came the moment of shock. The supplier had taken out some of the oil, hydrogenated it and then returned it back to the oil in order to make a butter. Since when was the process of hydrogenation “organic”? If God-given rain is not organic then how on earth can the process of hydrogenation be organic? Frankenstein would have been proud.
When the foundations are compromised the house falls down. If there is to be a future in “organic” then they need to put their house in order and review some of the things that are very badly wrong.
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