Baking soda is a chemical. Why don’t we treat it like one?

Baking soda is one of the most widely recognized chemicals in the world, and yet we don’t treat it like one.

It is a relatively humble molecule: one atom each of sodium, hydrogen, and carbon, and three of oxygen.

Unlike many other chemicals that have risen and fallen from public grace, baking soda has had a sustained positive perception for thousands of years. Though some of baking soda’s uses delve into the dangerous or criminal, the vast majority are innocuous. Alongside apple cider vinegar and lemon juice, baking soda rounds out the cleaning cohort of many eco-friendly homes; with water and flour, a triumvirate of the core requirements for baking.

And yet we don’t treat baking soda the same way we do glyphosate, the notorious Roundup Ready pesticide that neurotic parents harp on about endlessly in comments sections. Baking soda has a lower lethal dose (LD50) than glyphosate, meaning that if you were to continually eat equal parts baking soda and glyphosate, you would die from the baking soda first. And people BRUSH THEIR TEETH WITH IT.

In such a chemophobic world, how is it that we’ve come to embrace this chemical so easily?

Origin story

Mining lake beds for minerals in 3500 B.C., early Egyptians discovered a chalky, white mineral salt that they could use for a variety of applications, largely due to its caustic properties. It was called ‘natron’ from its origin, the Wadi El Natrun Valley, a sun-baked region ~450km north-west of Cairo (also where we get sodium’s ‘Na’ moniker in the Periodic Table of Elements). Other early societies around the world began co-opting natron’s antiseptic and detergent properties for everything from preserving meats to bleaching clothing to cleaning teeth to synthesizing paints. Over the course of several thousand years, humans learned to combine natron with countless other ingredients to create a diverse set of incredibly useful chemicals.

Natron, a chemical sidekick for literally millennia, is a simple slurry of various sodium metal salts. With the advent of laboratory science and standardized chemical manufacturing in the late 18th century, scientists gained the ability to extract specific compounds from the chalky crumbles of earthy natron: crystalline sodium sulfate, powdery sodium carbonate decahydrate, and eventually, in 1791, pure sodium bicarbonate- what we call baking soda.

Fast-forward fifty-five years to 1846, when two New Jersey bakers first struck upon one of the most important commercial roles for baking soda to this day: (surprise!) a baking additive. John Dwight and Austin Church co-discovered that by combining baking soda with any acid, they could produce tasteless carbon dioxide bubbles- a functionality that only yeast could provide at that time. Enabling bakers to leaven bread without yeast allowed them to simplify their baking process and initiate a paradigm shift towards non-yeasty flavoured baked goods.

So began one of the most powerful chemical manufacturing companies in the world; the two men formed their eponymous Church & Dwight Co. in Dwight’s kitchen in Ewing, New Jersey, and began producing a new compound they called ‘bicarbonate of soda’- baking soda. The bakers-turned-chemists cooked up vast quantities of baking soda and sold it in hand-packaged brown bags out of the back door of their kitchen. Their iconic logo, the arm and hammer of the Roman god Vulcan, was introduced in 1867.

Baker Chemist Merchant… Ad Guy?

Church & Dwight’s iconic Arm and Hammer baking soda quickly became the only brand-recognizable soda on the market, largely due to shrewd and successful advertising campaigns. Arm and Hammer arguably invented some of the very first ‘viral’ marketing tactics, distributing baking soda trading cards (in 1888) and publishing baking soda magazines long before any other company thought to influence markets that way. The company may also have been the first technological ‘early adopter’- A&H quickly took advantage of nearly every emergent media opportunity to execute their advertising campaigns: mini cookbooks sent by direct mail (in 1860), radio advertising in the 1920s, and eventually television.

Another enduring characteristic adopted by A&H brand was corporate environmental responsibility. Though it may have been a marketing ploy at first, the company has been manufacturing their product in a sustainable and minimally-carbon intensive way for centuries. For instance: in 1907, at the height of plastics research and in the same year the world’s first fully-synthetic plastic was produced, Arm and Hammer instituted a company-wide policy committing them to distributing their iconic soda in its trademark recyclable paper boxes. Similarly, after expanding their product line to include detergents, Arm and Hammer became the first company to produce phosphate-free soaps and powders, now an industry standard. And, in 1970, Arm and Hammer became first (and then, only) sponsor for our planet’s first ‘World Earth Day‘.

NaHCO₃

Due in part to these activities on behalf of its near-eponymous distributor, baking soda has long been understood to be environmentally-friendly, sustainable, and safe.

But how is it that we so easily embrace this chemical? Because let’s not forget- baking soda is a chemical, just like bleach or food colouring or the preserving agents in store-bought food. The simplicity embodied in the molecule has nothing to do with its properties.

Don’t forget that when you buy an organic apple from a local orchardist, you’re being sold arsenic. When you buy kale from a local farmer’s market, you’re being sold phosphorous and selenium and pantothenic acid. And when you buy baking soda to create home-made, green alternatives for toothpaste, Drain-O, or deodorant, you’re still buying a chemical.

Don’t trust your gut

Remember, too, that some companies will sell you chemicals and tell you that they’re safe (ahem: Arm and Hammer). Others will sell you the idea that chemicals are inherently bad for you (looking at you, Whole Foods). Nature is made up of chemicals, and human-made chemicals are not necessarily worse for you than naturally-occurring chemicals. Especially when they’ve been scientifically reviewed by the same groups that say kale is good for you.

Luckily for us, we all like baking soda AND it happens to be safe. What about all the other chemicals that you don’t like- is that a gut instinct, something fed by television ads or shoddy nutrition blogs? Or is it a perspective immersed in the consensus of scientific research?

‘Gut instinct’ is maybe the least scientific expression ever conceived- if you claim to appreciate the value of science research, you don’t get to pick and choose what you believe within the findings.