)
Lovin' Your Oven and Caring for Your Counters
For vast numbers of Americans, the kitchen is the center of the home. Drawn by the many rituals of eating and drinking, the delicious smells of cooking food, and its function as a nerve center of sorts, we tend to gravitate toward the kitchen as the spot where friends and families most often come together for gatherings both spontaneous and planned.
Our kitchens provide our physical sustenance and fulfill our emotional needs. But the same place where we cook, eat and assemble is often inadvertently one of the most toxic spots in the modern house. Ironically, this is because we seek to keep our kitchens cleaner and safer than almost anywhere else in the house. After all, this is where all our food is and no one wants to store, prepare or consume their meals in anything less than an optimum germ-free environment.
Yet as we all know from personal experience, maintaining a sparkling clean kitchen means confronting some of the more vexing cleaning problems. From baked-on oven grease and heavily trafficked floors to bacteria left behind by raw meats and that leftover lasagna-turned-science-experiment you forgot was in the back of the fridge, kitchens present us with an almost constant onslaught of challenges. To meet them, we often turn to all kinds of tough chemical cleaners, scorched-earth disinfectants, and industrial-strength grime fighters. But our use of these materials has the unintended side effect of transforming our kitchens into hazardous-waste sites, the very last thing we want or would expect to happen.
A prime cause of the chemical trouble that often boils over in our kitchens is all the grease they accumulate. In the course of cooking, oils and grease get spread everywhere from countertops to oven floors. To remove them, we rely on a variety of chemical cleaners. Some, like all-purpose cleaners, we spray and wipe. Others, like oven cleaners, we leave in place for extended periods of time in order to allow them to eat away at stubborn baked-on, caked-on grime.
In general, these kinds of formulas rely on two different types of chemical compound to do their dirty work. First, a solvent is used to dissolve the grease or oil and lift it from the surface in question. Then a surfactant is usually employed to mix the now-lifted grime with water and allow it to be easily and completely wiped away. In the case of oven cleaners, dangerous acids like lye may also be included in the formula to help eat away at hardened deposits. It's because of ingredients like these that oven cleaners are often the most toxic cleaning product found in a typical home. Using these products contaminates kitchen surfaces with chemical residues and exposes us to hazardous fumes.
Fortunately, there are a number of effective natural-ingredient alternatives waiting on store shelves. These products use a variety of compounds obtained from plants and other healthier sources to do the work performed by the synthetic surfactants, solvents, acids and other petrochemicals found in traditional cleaners. Citrus fruits, for example, provide safe grease-cutting compounds that make short work of oily grime. Hydrogen peroxide, a non-toxic agent that breaks down into water and oxygen, sanitizes surfaces. Vegetable-derived soaps and surfactants clean up dirt and soils effortlessly.
Another option is to make your own cleaners using natural ingredients. In Better Basics for the Home, natural-household-formula expert Annie Berthold-Bond offers the following homemade alternatives:
NEXT: Make your own cleaners
