Choosing and Maintaining a Toxic-Free Cutting Board
Toxic-Free Talk Radio
Archives of radio interview transcripts with leading toxic-free innovators recorded 2013-2015
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Choosing and Maintaining A Toxic Free Cutting Board
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Michal Gal
Date of Broadcast: October 01, 2015
My guest today is Michal Gal, founder of Urthware. His wooden cutting boards are made with exactly the materials I would choose if I were designing a cutting board, and they are beautiful. Michael is a proud husband and father of three, who decided to look deeper into companies and their products. After a lot of researching outfitting his kitchen with more natural and safe cookware he found that there were no cutting boards that were up to his standards. So he made one for himself using no petroleum based finishes and no glues, just natural wood and oils. People kept asking him if he could make one for them, and Urthware was born. www.urthware.com
Transcript:
DEBRA: Hi! I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.
It’s Thursday, October 1st 2015. Wow! October 1st already. It’s almost Christmas. It just seemed like this year has gone by so fast.
We’re going to talk today about cutting boards. I know that might sound a trivial little thing around the house, but cutting boards are very important to people who cook. And when you put food on a toxic cutting board, those toxic chemicals get into the food and then you eat that food. So today we’ll talk about choosing a cutting board that is toxic-free and also caring for a cutting board in a way that isn’t going to add toxic chemicals to it.
My guest makes cutting boards. He started his own company because he wanted to live without toxic chemicals. And after he did a lot of research outfitting his kitchen with more natural and safe cookware, he found that there were no cutting boards that were up to his standards.
And I’m smiling as I say that because when I looked at his cutting boards, I said, “Yes, if I were designing a cutting board, this is exactly how I would make it.” And not only is it as toxic-free as I would specify, but they are also beautiful. I actually have one in my hand right now and it is just as gorgeous as I thought it would be after looking at the website.
So my guest today is Michael Gal. He’s the founder of Urthware. Hi Michael!
MICHAL GAL: Hello! How are you?
DEBRA: I am great! How are you?
MICHAL GAL: I’m doing great. I’m glad to be on your show.
DEBRA: And I’m so glad to have you. So let’s start out. Why don’t you tell us your story of why did you decide that you wanted to have a toxic-free kitchen?
MICHAL GAL: Well, like many people, when you have kids, you start to look around yourself and you start to see different chemicals in everything in the world. You’re trying to keep them safe, right? The more you research in the Internet age we are in now, there’s a plethora of information. And as you research more and more, it becomes more and more confusing on what’s safe and what’s not.
So I retrofitted my kitchen because I started eating organic and feeding my kids organic food. But then you hear about all the chemicals in all your pots, pans and everything in your kitchen. I wanted to simplify.
As I retrofitted my kitchen, I couldn’t find alternatives for cutting boards that didn’t give me pause, that didn’t give me any questions.
DEBRA: And I actually want us to talk about that after you tell us your story. We need to discuss what are those aspects that gave you pause.
But go on with your story.
MICHAL GAL: So, as I retrofitted my kitchen, I couldn’t find an alternative for cutting boards that either wasn’t plastic or coated with something I didn’t want in my kid’s food. And when you’re putting your food on a surface, you have to expect something is going to leech from it. So you want to know what that surface is.
I just couldn’t find any good information on anything that would fit the bill. So I made my own cutting board.
DEBRA: And I’m so glad you did.
MICHAL GAL: Oh, thank you. People liked it and family members liked it and I figured, “Well, you know what? I might as well try this out on the market.” They’re beautiful (if I may say so myself) as well as non-toxic. I can’t see why not. So that’s where I started.
DEBRA: That’s so wonderful. Okay, tell us about the chemicals. Well, off the top of my head, here are the cutting boards that I can think of.
I can think of plastic ones. I can think of all those plastics that are different colors. You buy a whole set because one is for vegetables and one is for meat, et cetera. I think those are used a lot in restaurants.
And then, you can buy glass ones actually. Then there are wood cutting boards, solid wood cutting boards. I’m looking at this and it’s solid wood. It’s a solid piece of wood. And then there are cutting boards that are made from strips of wood that are glued together.
Those are all the ones I could think of. Are there more?
MICHAL GAL: Oh, there’s bamboo as well. You could actually use rubber. I’m trying to think of anything else. That’s the general list of what people would use.
DEBRA: So in looking at those, what were the things that gave you pause that you didn’t want to use in those? What are the chemicals that you identified?
MICHAL GAL: Chemicals in plastics, there’s just so many of them and we all know they leech. They’re replacing BPA with BPS and BPF.
Who’s to say those are any better? And they’re finding out slowly that they’re not. They’re just to replace. In a couple of years, we’ll see BPS and BPS-free on the packaging.
DEBRA: Yes!
MICHAL GAL: So, plastic boards were just out of the question.
DEBRA: What type of plastic did they use to make cutting boards? I never researched that. I just eliminated.
MICHAL GAL: What’s that?
DEBRA: What type of plastic do they use to make plastic boards?
MICHAL GAL: Honestly, it’s been a while since I’ve researched plastic cutting boards because they seem off the table very early in my research of what I wanted to use.
DEBRA: Me too!
MICHAL GAL: I was retrofitting my kitchen to not have plastics in it because of all the questions surrounding plastics and what they’re leeching. They’re disrupting your system. You could get all kinds of plastics. I’m not a big chemist in the plastics field.
DEBRA: It’s okay.
MICHAL GAL: I disregarded plastics pretty much right away because that’s just not something I wanted to cut on. Plus, if you look into it, you can find out that there’s a study done by Dr. Cliver in UC Davis Food Safety Laboratory. And everybody else thinks plastic is more sanitary than wood. Well, it’s not actually the case.
People say if you can put it in the dishwater, the dishwater is hot and you must get rid of all the bacteria. But what they found is that when plastic cutting boards gets scarred, not even a dishwasher kills all the bacteria. Whereas woods, what they do is they actually absorb the bacteria. They starve it and the bacteria can’t procreate and they die.
So wood is what I wanted to have. It’s what I’m going with. It’s harder to make a one-piece wooden cutting board.
DEBRA: Why is that difficult?
MICHAL GAL: One of the reasons is they tend to have movement. They tend to warp.The larger you make it, the more propensity it has to warp. So what I’ve done is reinforce them is with food-grade stainless steel rod down the center.
DEBRA: Oh!
MICHAL GAL: The board you actually have is one of the smaller boards. It’s a light-duty board. It’s wide not enough to need them in my research.
DEBRA: Yeah, I was just picking it up for the steel rods. And then, I thought, “Oh, it must be only in the larger ones.
MICHAL GAL: Yeah. As boards get bigger, we added more reinforcing to stop any movement. Obviously, all wood boards can move. That helps a lot.
DEBRA: Yeah.
MICHAL GAL: Sorry, what was the question? I get off on tangents, so you got to keep me in line here.
DEBRA: It’s okay. The question was about – let’s see. I don’t remember. But here, let me ask you another question that’s related. And we need to go to break pretty soon, but let me ask you the question and even if we don’t have time to answer, we’ll get started to put the question.
So there are a lot of cutting boards that are made from pieces or strips of wood. I think what we were talking about was you decided that you wanted to use wood and then you said something about needing to reinforce it, that if you just had a solid piece of wood, that it tends to warp. So I think the next logical thing is to be looking at that a lot of wood cutting boards are made of little, small pieces of wood that are then glued together.
That’s where we start having a concern about adhesives and finishes on the wood, which we can talk about when we come back!
MICHAL GAL: Okay!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Michal Gal. He’s the founder of Urthware.
They make the most toxic-free cutting boards that I’ve ever seen and they’re so gorgeous. The way it’s spelled is U-R-T-H-W-A-R-E, Urthware.com. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Michal Gal. He’s the founder of Urthware. He makes beautiful cutting boards out of wood because he doesn’t want plastics in his kitchen and he couldn’t find a cutting board of any kind that met his toxic-free standards.
Okay! So Michal, tell us about how they actually make those cutting boards that are all those strips of woods put together.
MICHAL GAL: What they do is they take the smaller pieces of wood. My major concern when I was looking for a cutting board was when they were coming out of a foreign country, I don’t know what glues they’ve used or what coatings they’ve used on the board. A lot of the cheaper glues are phenolic resin. These are formaldehyde-based resins. I really didn’t want to be cutting on them.
Bamboo boards as well, they’re small strips of wood. They’re really small strips of [inaudible 00:14:56]. So they take a lot of glue to manufacturer. And of course, those glues are really cheap. They’re inexpensive glues. But they’re also toxic. So they can tout the ecobenefits of bamboo, but they’re negating it by putting in the toxic chemicals as glues.
DEBRA: That’s right.
MICHAL GAL: The other major factor was they’re not coating them – most manufacturers can’t tell you what they’re coating their boards in. Any wooden board, including bamboos, are going to need some sort of oil to keep them from cracking and drying out. A lot of manufacturers can’t tell you what oils they used in it. And normally, it’s either an undisclosed oil or most likely, it’s mineral oil.
Well, mineral oil is low on the toxicity scale. It’s still a petroleum-based product. It’s a byproduct of gasoline. So I really didn’t see the point of having to cut my expensive organic food on a petroleum-based product when there are natural alternatives as well as to the glues.
We do make some larger boards and they do use glue. We make them with FDA-approved glue made in the USA. It’s not a phenol resin based glue. It’s far more expensive to produce. But all the all-natural series contain no glue because of the wide pieces of wood.
The other reasons manufacturers make them out of small pieces of wood is because they’re a lot more cheaper to manufacture. And normally, they don’t care. They only care about end mark-up, what they could make on the board.
Whereas with those coatings, those glues, once they take them out of the equation – and I found an actual alternative, which I have. It’s the organic walnut oil and beeswax. It works just as well as the synthetic, it just costs a hundred times more expensive to coat a board. Mineral oil is so cheap and that’s why manufacturers use it because they don’t care. They’re just sending whatever will sell.
When you look into things, we can’t even find out what the coating was, which is why I decided I’ll make a product. And it’s hard to actually simplify things. It ends up being more expensive to make something simple than it is to make something more complicated for some reason. It’s harder to do, but you end up with a better, more solid product.
People that buy our boards, they’re always raving about the fact that they’re beautiful as well as functional. You can have both, right?
DEBRA: You can, you absolutely can. I read a quote by Buckminster Fuller many years ago. I can’t remember it exactly. He was a big sustainability designer. He said that he wants it to be functional and everything. And then he said, “If it’s also beautiful, then I know I got it right.”
You can just look around in nature and see that nature has designed all these beautiful farms and colors. Everything is just gorgeous in nature. It’s all part of the design. And so I feel like you’re really honoring the materials and that you have brought this element of beauty and carefulness and high quality to your product that goes along with it being also safe for use and nurturing of our senses as well.
MICHAL GAL: Well, thank you. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m a graphic designer by trade. I try to bring in my eye not just for function, but for beauty.
The other great thing about wood versus plastic is they’re biodegradable. So when you do eventually wear out your cutting board (because obviously, it’s a cutting surface, those wear out eventually), it doesn’t have an impact on the environment in the end of its life. It can go right back into the environment. And even down to the gum rubber feet, they’re not PVC or plastic-based feet that are natural products. So everything about the board is good for the environment in that respect.
Obviously, you have to use materials to make that. You try to be as eco-friendly as you can like using an FDA-approved mill to down trees.
I’ll use any woods that I know are clean woods that were harvested using good practices. I’ll do anything I can to get lumber that way. That’s hard too. Whereas most of the boards coming out of poorer country, you don’t actually know what the board is made of. It’s just whatever scrap from the company that had reclaimed the wood.
Reclaim work sounds nice. But really, I don’t want to be cutting on that since I don’t know where it was in its previous life.
DEBRA: Yeah, I totally understand. I like the idea of reclaimed wood, especially if you’re cutting food on it. If somebody was making something else and they just threw the piece of wood in a corner and someone came along with a cleaning product, wood is very absorbing and anything that it comes near will go into the wood and then it will come back out.
MICHAL GAL: Absolutely!
DEBRA: Anyway, we need to go to break again. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Michal Gal.
He’s the founder of Urthware. And again, that’s Urthware.com. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Michal Gal, founder of Urthware. He’s at Urthware.com. You know, Michal, during the break, I’m just sitting here feeling the board. It’s so tactically pleasant to just run my hand over the finish and over the wood and all the corners are so nicely sanded. Everything is just so pleasant, just to sit here.
MICHAL GAL: Thank you. A lot of people say, “Uh, I don’t want to cut on this.” I say, “Well, then buy two. One for show and one for you.”
Obviously, because they’re not coated in anything toxic, they need to be taken care of a little bit more than a regular glass board or bamboo board.
DEBRA: Let’s talk about care. I, myself, have an old maple board. I don’t even remember when I got it. That’s how old it is, so it’s maybe 10 or 15 years old. I actually don’t do anythign to care for it. I’m chopping on it all day long and I just run a sponge over it.
So for those of who have wood boards already and for people who are about to purchase your beautiful wood boards, how should we be taking care of them?
MICHAL GAL: Well, in general, it’s not that complicated. Any wood board (this goes for any wood board), you can’t put it in the dishwasher. They have to be handwashed. You’ll end up with a very expensive piece of firewood if you put in a good woodboard into a dishwasher. But in general, you’re just using regular dish soap and warm water to wash a board.
To disinfect it, there are natural ways to disinfect things. There are natural ways to disinfect things. You can use vinegar and a coarse salt scrub, baking soda, a little bit of hydrogen peroxide. If you get some odors on (you know when you’re using onions, you’ll actually get a little bit of an odor on the board), half a lemon will clean the smell out of a wooden board. So there are natural ways to clean them.
After that, in general, normally, just soap and water clean-up if you’re just doing vegetables and meat on them. The only time you really have to use a vinegar is when you’re sanitizing and that can actually be done periodically or after you’ve used raw meat on the board.
DEBRA: So let’s talk about raw meat for a minute. What I do is that I kind of follow the lead of the restaurants where they have different colored plastic boards, but mine aren’t plastic. I have a big board that’s maple. That’s where I cut my vegetable. When I cut meat, raw meat, I have another smaller board hanging on the wall. I think it’s bamboo. I got it more recently. It’s just a little inexpensive wood board. And so I just take that off the wall. I cut my meat and it goes straight into the sink with hot water and soap. And then it hangs back up on the wall so that it’s air dried. So that’s what I do. But I think that it’s important that people not cut raw meat on their board. What do you think about that? You just sounded like you thought it was okay.
MICHAL GAL: I personally agree with wanting two cutting boards, one for non-cooked items like vegetables and fruits and one for raw meat, poultry, fish, raw red meat only because of cross-contamination. If you don’t clean the board well enough and it doesn’t have sufficient time to dry enough to kill all of the bacteria, you could run into cross-contamination issues. So it is bestto run two cutting boards, but that’s not necessarily a must. As long as you’re disinfecting a board after you’ve used it, you could use it for both purposes. I don’t recommend it. It’s a lot safer to do the other way. And that’s exactly what I do. I just have a different board for meat in my kitchen because then there’s no chance you missed anything.
DEBRA: That’s right, that’s right.
MICHAL GAL: And that’s the best way to do it because then even if you did mess up when you’re cutting raw meat again on the raw board, that gets cooked. You could kill off the bacteria by cooking. So that is definitely the best way to do it.
And wooden boards, you should be oiling your wooden board, your poor wooden board. Normally, the best way of taking care of a wooden board, a lot of people use the mineral oil, which is hypoallergenic and everything, but then again, it’s a petroleum-based product. So there are natural alternatives.
Don’t use normal oils like vegetable oil or olive oil. They will go rancid. You wil actually get a bad smell in your board from using those oils. I saw people using olive oil and stuff. After a time, it does go rancid.
So your best bet (and the best bet I’ve found) is walnut oil. It is actually a drying oil. It pulverizes. So it’s not a chemical process. It’s oxidizing. It ends up with you getting a semi-hard coating on the board. So basically, like your cast iron pan. You see this in a cast iron pan.
Over time, your board will become saturated and the walnut oil will harden.
DEBRA: Oh!
MICHAL GAL: That’s one of the reasons I really recommend walnut oil because it does dry. And because it’s a cutting board, it does get air all the time. So, it will oxidize and will polymerize and become a protective coating on your board. So over time, your board becomes seasoned just like your cast iron pan wood.
DEBRA: And you can use just regular, culinary walnut oil? I’m just being cautious to think. Would somebody go to a hardware store and they would have denatured walnut oil with lots of chemicals in it or something?
MICHAL GAL: Never go to the hardware store to get anything. See, I only use anything you could eat. People get confused on the terminology. Linseed oil is another one you could use on the board. It does have a smell to it. But do not ever go to the hardware store and get linseed oil because it’s going to have chemical dryers in it. That’s why it hardens in a day or two. It’s a chemical process now instead of natural oxidization process. It’s natural polymerization. If you use actual edible linseed oil, it would take 30-60 days to try. That’s why they add the chemical heavy metal dryers to it.
So always get food-grade things to coat your board. I recommend obviously walnut oil. For people with walnut or nut allergies, you can use coconut oil. It does resist rancidity. It has a really high saturated fat content. It takes a long time to actually go rancid. I never actually had a board go rancid because it gets washed all the time too.
DEBRA: We need to go to break again. We’ll be back and talk more about cutting boards and how to care for them (and other related items) with my guest, Michal Gal, founder of Urthware, Urthware.com. Your’e listening to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.
We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Michal Gal, founder of Urthware. That’s Urthware.com. Michal, I want to ask you a question about a subject that is one of my pet subjects. As an artisan manufacturer of a product, obviously, by looking at your website, you think that it’s important for you to disclose all the materials.
MICHAL GAL: Yup!
DEBRA: Tell us why you think that’s important.
MICHAL GAL: Because most companies either won’t disclose their materials or they don’t know what they are. Manufacturing has become so complicated that, honestly, if you call most companies on most products, they can’t tell you what the products are. There are so many thousands of chemicals getting into the flow of manufacturing every year, no one has an idea of their combination of those chemicals, how they’re reacting with their environment with you.
I just think it’s important if you’re using something, you know what it is. In generally, we’re obviously going to be exposed to tons of chemicals daily. But why do it when you have a choice. We have a choice, look into it and reduce the amount of chemicals you’re exposed to.
So if I tell everyone what’s in it or what’s actually not in it, that’s the major thing about my products, it’s very simple. You’re cutting on a natural wood and a natural oil. There’s nothing leeching in your food that you couldn’t eat.
And a lot of people, they just want to know what’s in something. It’s still hard to find out. I became really frustrated with this. I don’t want to frustrate a lot of customers. I just tell them what’s in it. I have nothing to hide about it.
DEBRA: Exactly!
MICHAL GAL: And when I was researching different cutting boards, some of them sounded really good on the surface. I don’t want to say brand names, but the skin cutting ones that you can put in the dishwasher and everything, hard surface, basically, you’re cutting on paper mixed with glue. So the surface you’re cutting on is basically just glue. It’s a plastic board with some wood product in it.
I just became frustrated when people through out the word ‘green’ and ‘organic’ and ‘eco’ when it’s not. In my opinion, it’s not when you’re using synthetics constantly and you don’t say that you are.
Like I said, some of my boards do contain glue and it’s totally disclosed. You can even get the MSDS on the glues.
DEBRA: And that’s the way it should be. I think that’s the way it should be. I’ve been a consumer-advocate for over 30 years. My most frustrating, the reason I like to talk about this so much is because if what you want to do is avoid toxic chemicals, it makes it very, very difficult to do so if you don’t disclose that they’re there on the label.
I’ve said many times on this show an example of if you have apple sauce, it has to be labeled organic apple sauce and instead, having the supermarket apple sauce be labeled apples and pesticides.
MICHAL GAL: Yes, yeah. It’s frustrating out there. It is. It’s just frustrating. The easiest way is to just simplify anything. Eat more raw food, organic food. The labels, most people can’t decipher those. The simpler, the better.
So back to simpler times, when people are adding all these things to cutting boards to make them better, it’s a trick. The natural product is just as good or better. There’s no reason to change what used to be how things were made.
Bamboo boards as well, the glue is in the coatings. If you can’t know what’s in those in whatever type of wood it is, it’s a problem. It should be labeled.
DEBRA: It absolutely should be. I think consumers can learn. I know that as a consumer, I’ve learned. But here, I’m just enjoying talking to you today so much because as I’m sitting here with your cutting board next to me, I know what’s in it, I know what the materials are, I now know the person who made it with his own hands. And when I use it, that’s what I think of. I know this product. That’s hard to say for most cutting boards.
MICHAL GAL: It’s comforting to know…
DEBRA: It is!
MICHAL GAL: …instead of the question mark there. The question mark, it gets frustrating especially if you have kids and you don’t want to add anything to their – you know, you want to be the helicopter parent. But one of the reasons I did want to cope is because it’s not something you come into contact with infrequently. It’s every day. Your food is on it constantly. So it’s not one-time thing. You’re using that all the time with your food and you’re actually cutting into it.
And that’s another big thing. When you’re cutting into something, you’re scarring the surface. It has toxins in it, you’re bringing them.
You’re adding liquid to it with the fruits and vegetables. You’re cutting into the board, you don’t want there to be anything in there. The cleaner, the better.
DEBRA: I appreciate you disclosing – well, first of all, that you’ve done such a great job and that you’re disclosing everything so that everyone can feel confident about what your product is. That’s really great.
We only have a few minutes left, about four minutes. What else would you like to talk about?
MICHAL GAL: I don’t know. Is there any questions you have?
DEBRA: Well, I asked all my questions about cutting boards, but we can talk about any message you’d like to get out in the world, especially your views as a toxic-free parent or as a manufacturer, anything you’d just like to say?
MICHAL GAL: Oh, I don’t know. Just simplify. We’re all going to come into contact with tons of toxins in this world. Just simlify everything, especially in your kitchen because it’s one of the major ways things get into your system.
DEBRA: Oh, I know! Tell us what you did to retrofit your kitchen.
MICHAL GAL: Oh, obviously, the first thing is to switch all your cookware over. I switched to glass and got rid of the plastics. One of the major things is taking all the plastic containers that we had and storing things in glass because glass doesn’t leech. A clean glass doesn’t leech. So, getting rid of all of that stuff.
And then cooking on cast iron was a major difference to me. Once you look into actually what’s on pans, you find the warnings, “Do not overheat. The pans causes toxic fumes.” it’s good to just switch over to things, to enameled cast iron if you need crock pots and stuff.
DEBRA: So did you change your dinnerware, plates and bowls and stuff like that?
MICHAL GAL: No, because I was already using glass for those things. I didn’t have to change those over. But changing from plastic spoons, plastic cookware utensils to wooden ones. Actually, that’s what started the cutting board thing because I didn’t know what the wooden spoons were coated in. I was wondering what the coatings were.
DEBRA: Well, yeah. There are a lot of wooden spoons for cooking and things. If you go to a cooking store, they’ll just have these wooden things. They won’t know what type of wood it is and if there’s any finish, where it came from. It’s just a wooden spoon.
But I love wooden spoons, but I’ve actually purchased a fair number of wooden spoons at craft fairs where I can talk to the person like you who is the artisan who has made the spoon and they know all about it.
MICHAL GAL: Absolutely! That’s probably the best. On FB, find someone. And then, just tell them either uncoated or coated in a preferred coating like a walnut oil or a coconut oil. Most people will use mineral oil to coat things. They’re calling it butcher block oil or natural oil. Technically, crude oil is natural I guess if you want to go there.
DEBRA: Well, petroleum is natural. Where do you live?
MICHAL GAL: Paris, Ontario, Canada. –
DEBRA: Oh, that’s right. You’re in Canada. In Los Angeles, there’s a wonderful place called the La Brea tar pits, which is a tourist attraction and museum. They have these natural tarpits. The animals would come in back in prehistoric times and they’d get stuck in the tar and so there are all these animal bones in the tarpits. They’ve been pulling them out and reconstructing them. That’s what you see in the museum.
But as you enter the museum, you see around the edges of where the sidewalk meets the grass, tar bubbling up. That’s natural tar. It’s natural. That’s a petroleum product. That’s what all these things are made of. You can actually see.
But the problem that I see is that the products aren’t being made out of natural tar. They’re being changed. They’re being chemically altered.
It’s these man-made things that our bodies don’t know what to do with.
MICHAL GAL: Absolutely! A lot of natural things our body doesn’t want to deal with either.
DEBRA: Sure! Like I wouldn’t eat tar, for example. Anyway, we only have about 20 seconds before the music comes on. So thank you so much, Michal for being on. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you and a pleasure to be sitting here with your cutting board.
My guest is Michal Gal from Urthware, Urthware.com. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!