Laundry habits may have to change if we’re to save the planet
Iam writing this to the soothing soundtrack of the washing machine, burbling away in the background. But that gentle burble involves a control panel of Byzantine complexity, offering 14 different programmes, some of which take upwards of four hours to complete. In impatient moments, I consider taking the laundry down to the local stream and scrubbing it on a washboard. As it happens, a report published in the Society of Chemistry Industry’s (SCI) magazine suggests that instead of investing in ever more sophisticated laundry technology, we should be considering whether to wash our clothes at all.
When it comes to modern spiritual values, cleanliness has decisively overtaken godliness, with online influencers such as Mrs Hinch leading an army of filth-banishing crusaders.
The route to our obsession with germ warfare is tortuous: from the early Christian conviction that a disregard for personal hygiene was a mark of sanctity (the virgin martyr St Agnes is said to have expired unwashed at the age of 13), via the aristocratic 16th and 17th-century preference for washing their linen often, and their bodies seldom, to our current distaste for finding ourselves in proximity to anyone who smells of anything more corporeal than laundry detergent.
But now a clash of competing moralities looms: the long-standing conflation of cleanliness with virtue has come up hard against the environmental cost of our hyperactive laundry habits. In idle moments, while admiring the lavish outfits of earlier eras, I have sometimes wondered how they managed to clean their dimity, bombazine, figured damask and so on. As we become more laundry aware, we may find out: Orsola de Castro, the author of Loved Clothes Last, recommends spot-cleaning, brushing, freezing (for jeans) and handwashing. So perhaps my impatient vision of bashing the laundry on a washboard was a prediction, rather than a retro fantasy.
When the post-pandemic office commute resumes, we should brace ourselves for the return of what is daintily known in French as bouquet de corsage. The novelist Colette enticingly described the iris scent of her heroine’s armpits, while the Stoic philosopher, Seneca, wrote in praise of the manly pong “of the army, of farm work”. Amid the virtuous miasma of iris and byre, we should be grateful for small mercies: the SCI admits the planet can tolerate the daily laundering of undergarments.
Strange news from the supermarket Aldi, whose recent survey reveals that many millennials have never encountered such beloved stodgy staples of our national cuisine as toad in the hole (which they fancy is made from real toads), and believe that spotted dick is a fictional confection.
All fashion is cyclical, and food is no exception. Just as cheap package holidays did for resorts such as Frintonon-sea (until recent events reawakened us to the charm of the staycation), the advent of packet Vesta curries and frozen chicken Kiev banished toad and bangers into an exile from which they were revived, a generation ago, by champions such as Simon Hopkinson (whose gammon with pease pudding is consumed with enthusiasm by my quasi-vegan son).
The vegan sausage roll may be in the ascendant now, but it is too soon to toll the knell for the great British ribsticker, in all its multifarious forms.