KEEP READING those labels

Sorting life after sixty the answers continue to surprise me.  It's been a long while since posting here.  Life is full of surprises, keeping me busy and entertained.  More and more I love the moments that stretch into a calm and unsurprising mode.  Life in small spaces, a minuscule kitchen and a gigantic thousand tree living room gives new definition to 'routine.'  We live under-the-wire, but not off the grid so electricity is our friend, and handwork (washing clothes, dishes, our selves) is a small, and conscious process.  I still wash everything in the kitchen sink using baking soda and hot filtered water.  Everything except for the dishes.  Until this morning, we have used one "consumer product" to do the dishes.  Planet Ultra Dish Soap had been our consumer product of choice, because as I wrote back in May, 2011 the choice was based on the simplicity and non-toxic nature of the ingredients. 

-unscented

-coconut oil based cleaner, salt,

sodium bicarbonate(baking soda)

That's what I wrote, and those were the ingredients of Planet Ultra Dish Soap then.  Link here to read my blog post from May, 2011.  http://www.fragrancefreein23.blogspot.com/2011/05/first-one.html
This morning, I was in the Quonset Hut standing at the sink.  The back of the dish soap container faced me.  Admitting to old, and blurry vision especially in the morning, I thought my eyes were doing their blurry trick thing.  My first clue:  more than enough letters.  In bold white letters against the green stripe of the soap's advertising was this:

OUR INGREDIENTS

Water (carrier) - Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Lauramine Oxide (plant-based cleaning agents) - Sodium Chloride (mineral viscosity adjuster) - Sodium Bicarbonate (mineral alkalinity adjuster)

Our one 'consumer cleaning product' of choice has been altered.  We had assumed the comfortable bliss of believing what was good, was still good.  But that ain't necessarily so.  Except for water and Sodium Bicarbonate, our former safe dish soap is now filled with chemicals we'd rather not consume.  To read more about what chemical like Sodium Laureth Sulfate are, I've linked to a site for a product that might fit the bill for me, and my husband.  Dr. Bonner's products have been around a long while, and are among the most benign soaps.  We were having trouble with the scent of even their most unscented product a year or more past, and today, I am out to explore the possibility that their unscented variety might be a present-day tolerable soap. 

Here's a link to FAQ on Dr. Bonner's products for your information and edification, and a snip from that website's page:

Do your soaps contain any foaming agents/detergents like Sodium Lauryl Sulfate?

Absolutely not. Our soaps are 100% true pure-castile soaps. The high foaming lather of our soaps is from their high coconut oil content, which makes a more luxurious and rich lather than any detergent can ever create. "Pure-Castile" is your guarantee that what you are using is a real ecological and simple soap, not a complex blend of detergents with a higher ecological impact due to the waste stream during manufacture and slower biodegradability. Unfortunately, many synthetic detergent blends are deceptively labeled as "Liquid Soap" even when they contain absolutely no soap whatsoever

http://www.drbronner.com/faqs_main.html#faq4

 It's one of those 'Ole Moon phases today, a time when review and reconsideration is better than forging new ground.  An opportunity.  I'll be searching for a new soap to wash the dishes, or washing them with baking soda diluted in hot water until a 'product' fits the bill.  I'll also be forwarding this post to the folks at the Tilthe, so their decision to keep using the once-good-news-soap can be made with new information to weigh.

Life continues to surprise me.