As a backyard Beekeeper, I’m concerned about what’s happening to our Bees!
In the ‘40’s and ‘50’s….there were literally hundreds of thousands of hives in North
America….mostly small operations that provided all of us with our honey and beeswax
products.
Now, natural beekeepers blame the ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ on the fact that the
honey industry is centered in the hands of one or two large companies. Even more scary,
it appears most of our honey now comes from China, mixed with cheaper syrup!
Crowded hives mean disease, mites and lots of antibiotics fed to the bees. What does this
have to do with soapmaking???
In the 40’s and 50’s there were hundreds of small soapmakers around, providing all of
us with soap, shampoo and the rest of our body care products. They used pretty much
natural ingredients; mostly tallow for soaps, and lanolin, herbs and other botanicals.
And it was all hand’s on.
Today, the industry is centered in only a few hands. All of the big brand-name soaps,
those small hotel soaps, the star and moon-shaped soaps, the brightly-colored glycerine
fruit soaps are all made by three or four independent soap manufacturers who make soap
for 100’s of different companies.
Most of these soaps, in North American anyway, are made from beef tallow. Why? I guess
we eat so much meat there is an unending supply of cheap tallow available. Unless a soap
lists its ingredients, you can bet it’s made of beef tallow.
Worse yet, the industry now refers to bar soaps as ‘syn-dets,’ meaning a synthetic detergent
bar. Through lots of lobbying, they don’t even have to list their ingredients. You don’t want
to know!!!
Decades ago, as a beginning soapmaker, I tried every soap I could lay my hands on! There
was a black one from Spain that was so smooth and silky it was an epiphany! And lots of
French and Italian ones…..I loved them…their smooth, silky creamy lather….not harsh and
drying like the commercial brands I had grown up with.
What made them different??? Well, vegetable oils for one thing. Mostly palm and coconut
oils….and lots of olive oil, plentiful in those countries. And they don’t have much beef!
Or petroleum by-products…..
I don’t want to get too technical…but next time, let’s look at the difference between those
scary syn-dets (one of the industry giants can make 600,000 bars a day) and the kind of
cold-processed vegetable-based handmade artisan soaps that we blend each day by hand.
Linda Quiring,
Founder, Saltspring Soapworks
