Practical Question and Answer series
For more questions and answers see the
Q&A Index.
Frank asks:
1) What do I do for toothpaste?
I don't know how to make it. Shampoo? Glycerine soap? Goodness--razors!
Toothpaste (and more):
Basic dental care (including brushing) is an extremely important
preventative health measure. This is especially the case if your
access to professional dental care might be limited. Toothpaste
in particular is important because makes brushing more effective
and more pleasurable.
A basic toothpaste can be made by combining baking soda, flavourings (like essential oils or herbs),
glycerine and salt.
Baking soda and salt are very mild abrasives and will help remove
the plaque and bits of food on your teeth and around your gums
that would contribute to decay, irritation and cavities. Some
recipes use clay powder for this purpose. Historically all kinds
of abrasives have been used, including pulverised brick and crushed
sand (which are probably too
abrasive).
The flavourings are there to making toothbrushing a more enjoyable
experience and to make your mouth taste better afterwards. Some
herbs and flavourings, such as cinnamon, also have anti-bacterial
properties that make them especially useful. One possible flavouring
option is stevia, which is a sweet-tasting herb which contains
almost no sugar. And you
can grow stevia yourself.
The glycerine is not an essential ingredient -- it's mostly there
to create the semi-solid consistency that we are used to in toothpaste.
If you don't have glycerine you can make some -- it's a by-product
of soap making. (See below.)
There are many recipes for toothpaste, but the simplest one is
simply to combine 3 parts baking soda with one part salt, and
add flavourings and glycerine to your liking.
But if you don't want to use it or don't have any you can make
a simple "tooth powder"
out of the baking soda, flavourings and salt (in the same ratio).
Tooth powders were quite popular in the 1800s and early 1900s,
but they originated as early as the Renaissance, in the form of
powders of dried sage, nettles and clay. You simply wet your
toothbrush and dip it in the container of powder, and then brush
your teeth. Tooth powders were generally home-made when they originally
appeared, so it is definitely something that you can do easily
yourself. A search of the internet will find a lot of specific
recipes, but you can experiment for yourself or start with this article from Mother Earth News.
If you don't have any of those things it is still better to brush
without toothpaste than to not brush at all. And if you don't
even have a toothbrush, you can make your own from a twig. Just
cut a small twig (from a non-poisonous woody plant!) and chew
on the end until it the fibres break apart and become "frayed".
It makes a surprisingly effective toothbrush, though reaching
around corners in your mouth can be a bit trickier. If you can,
choose twig from a tree with antiseptic properties, such as Western
Red Cedar (called by some indigenous peoples "the Tree of Life").
(On a related note, if you want to learn more about trees in "north
america" check out the excellent book Arboretum America:
A Philosophy of the Forest, by self-described "renegade scientist"
Diana Beresford-Kroeger. It discusses various
trees in great detail, along with how you can help propagate them
as well as their medicinal properties and indigenous uses.)
Since brushing only covers about three-quarters of the
surface of your teeth, don't forget to floss to clean the rest.
You can floss with any clean, non-toxic fibre. Before nylon became
the main floss material, silk was often used. Nylon apparently
replaced silk because it shreds less easily. Grooves on teeth
from unearthed stone-age skeletons show that toothpicks and floss
were in frequent use since long before civilization.
It's important to have a general understanding of dental care
beyond brushing and flossing. Check out Where There Is No Dentist
from the Hesperian Foundation.
Update, January 8, 2006: In Q&A #1 (toothpastes
and powders, soaps and shampoos, and razors) I posted a link to
a recipe for making soap using soapwort. However, MM reports that
soapwort plants have become quite rare in the wild. So unless
you have a supply of soapwort that does not deplete the wild population,
please try to use other recipes for soap.
I also mentioned originally making stick toothbrushes or "chew
sticks" out of pencil-sized twigs from trees like cedar with anti-septic
properties. It turns out that Oak and Sassafras have also been
commonly used to make chew sticks historically.
In addition, I came across a recipe for toothpaste which requires
no baking soda or glycerine, and was apparently used by some indigenous
people in north america. The recipe is simple: combine the powdered
new bark of an oak (especially black oak, Quercus velutina) with
the bark of a black alder (Alnus glutinosa) and add bayberry (Myrica
pensylvanica) and wild ginger (Asarum canadense) to form a paste,
and use as usual.
Lastly, I want to note that as the intake of sugary, processed
foods decreases people in general will probably have fewer problems
with tooth decay and cavities so long as they practice basic dental
hygiene.
Update, January 18. 2006: After reading Q&A
#1 Lierre Keith (who I've interviewed
before) writes in to comment on teeth. She writes:
"As for dentistry, our collective teeth
problems are caused by agricultural foods and especially industrial
foods. Hunter-gatherers typically have long, strong bones, well-formed
faces and jaws, teeth that fit, and no tooth decay. The moment
people start doing agriculture, they shrink, their bones get brittle
and tooth decay becomes a fact of life. Enter industrial foods
(denatured grains, white sugar, vegetable oil) and you've got
epidemics of degenerative diseases and tooth decay. We all accept
it as normal because it's everywhere around us, but our real birthright
is perfect health. Another way to say this is, we have paleolithic
bodies but we feed them neolithic foods and expect them to function?
I've known people who switched from the typical American diet
(white sugar, white flour, polyunsaturated oil, factory-fed animal
products) to a diet based on traditional principles (raw animal
fats, lots of meat and bones from pasture-rasied animals, a diet
that's rich in minerals and the fats we need to absorb them) and
had their teeth remineralize! Cavities stopped decaying and sealed
over. So it can be done. Anyone whose intrigued should read Nutrition
and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, or go to the website
http://www.westonaprice.org."
On the same theme, check out Jason
Godesky's related theses; civilization
makes us sick and collapse
increases quality of life.
Soap and Shampoo:
This is a big one, because soap is very important for hand washing
and preventing the spread of infections. Soap is a basic part
of sanitation, and even though civilization created most modern
infectious diseases through dense cities and animal domestication
(see Guns, Germs and Steel),
those diseases won't disappear when civilization collapses and
will probably temporarily get worse.
Soap is actually very easy to make. Essentially all you need is
fat and lye.
The fat can be from an animal or a vegetable source, but animal
fats will be more available in a post-collapse context in temperate
regions, since the easiest vegetable fat sources to extract oil
from (like palm and coconut) are tropical plants. Lye is
mostly sodium hydroxide, and it can be made by straining water
through wood ash -- but be careful, because lye can be highly
corrosive.
What you need to make soap is a bit of equipment, some recipes,
and practice. There are plenty of sources online for information
about soap-making. Check out the Soap Making Home Page
which has lots and lots of recipes and links, as well as this
primer on colonial soapmaking
and these
recipes from Soap Crafters Co.
If you are looking for a good hardcopy book about it, check out The Soapmaker's
Companion by Susan Miller Cavitch.
(An aside about the chemistry:
Fats used in soap-making are triglycerides,
which is a molecule of glycerol attached to three fatty acids.
When sodium hydroxide is added to the triglycerides (and usually
heated), the triglycerides break into liquid glycerine and a fatty
solid which is the actual soap. This process is called saponification, and there are some illustrations
of the molecules here. The glycerine can be removed and used for
other purposes like as part of toothpaste, as mentioned above.)
Once you have a basic soap recipe down you can add your own extras.
Scents and essential oils are a good start. Fine sand or crushed
pumice can be added to a soap to make it more abrasive and
help scrub off dirt.
You can use shampoo recipes that are closely related to soap recipes,
since originally they were essentially the same thing. Many shampoos
that you can make are just a soap-like recipe with extra scent
ingredients. Shampoos work by stripping the natural oils from
your hair. For recipes of soap-like shampoo, see Larraine's Shampoo Soap,
Diane's
Shampoo Bar, a hemp soap and shampoo
bar, and Chamomile Fields Shampoo.
You can also make shampoos that are not based on soap-style recipes.
For example, this recipe using soap wort
or even by simply sprinkling
corn starch in your hair while bathing.
However, it's definitely worth noting that if you simply stop
using (or use less) shampoo your scalp will gradually produce
less and less oil. Eventually you don't don't need very much (or
even any) shampoo at all.
Razors: I think
it's a given that disposable razors will be pretty hard to come
by in a post-collapse context, so you are best to look at how
people shaved before them. I shave with a straight
razor a friend bought me at an antique shop. You can buy them
new, but they are rather expensive. The straight razor can be
somewhat intimidating to start with, because it is essentially
a bare blade several inches long. The use of a straight razor
is something of a lost art, and it definitely requires a bit of
practice to get used to. It's good to be taught by someone else
who uses a straight razor, if you can find one. However, it really
isn't as dangerous as it looks and with you'll become an expert
in sort order if you shave regularly. You can find out more about
using a straight razor in this
other article from Mother Earth News. For equipment, you'll
need the razor itself, a hone or sharpening stone, and probably
a strop (a sharpening strap usually made from leather).
You might also consider a traditional double
edged safety razor. It is less intimidating, and although
it requires the blades to be replaced, you can sharpen them yourself
and reuse them which is not possible with modern disposable safety
razors. A simple old trick to sharpen a double-edged razor blade
is to sweep the edge around the inside surface of an (empty) water
glass, one side at a time. You'll need to make multiple circuits
of the glass to get it sharp enough to use.
There is a lot of information about both types of shaving at ClassicShaving.com.
The easiest option, of course, would simply be to stop shaving
at all!
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