Oh monday. Time to shower for the week and scrape off the weekend’s transgressions.
It is a running joke [true fact!] in our household that I am adverse to bathing and often daydream my time traveling back to the Court of Versailles. Lazily rubbing my gloved hands with fleur d’oranger and peppering fires with newly discovered Indian sandalwood.
It is here that I should mention that I am a terribly romanticizing packaging enthusiast.
I shall spend hours at a supermarket, admiring the clean font styles and the eye-catching labels of different products. I hem and aww at their buttery manilla envelope tags, their 100% biodegradable containers.
I read a lot. Even labels.
Which brings me to this fact: Every time I bathe, I am reminded of the dearly departed Dr. Emmanuel Bronner who “passed away peacefully on March 1997.”
While I appreciate the Bronner family’s tribute to this clean-cut entrepreneur, I cannot help but notice a creeping trend in natural bath products and living foods.
In our attempts to lead a raw and living foods lifestyle, we are blanketed with non-denominational Christian bible verses. Proselytizing us to a new, spiritual lifestyle.
Other examples include Ezekiel 4.9 Sprouted Grain Bread and Ak-mak cracker bread. But there are more.
This makes me uneasy. Does this make you uneasy?
Why? Yes! The following reasons:
1) The exclusion these wonderful food and bath products create for non-Christians. For example, part of my family is Hindu and from South Africa. I would feel embarrassed if they came to my kitchen and noticed these foodstuffs [as I am not, in fact, a non-denominational Christian].
2) The promotion of religion in a supermarket. Although food, diet, and bathing are integral to the majority of religious traditions, I feel as if “quoth-from-the-Bible” sprouted pasta is more aggressive than Matza.
3) The inclusion of religion denotes a self-congratulatory importance on these products. A name-dropping, if you will.
In short,
I am depressed about showering with dead people and would like to find my own spirituality somewhere other than the bottom of a pasta box.
Related posts:
I just found out that one of Dr. Bronner’s sons lives in my corner of WI, and occasionally shows up at the food co-op where I volunteer. Apparently, he likes to play guitar, tip the dishwashers outrageously, and pay for people’s groceries.
marry him.