Cleanliness is next to modliness

There's something about this article that resonates with me. Now I like things to be clean, but we have to be aware that our guts are full of bacteria and that we live in a mutually beneficial relationship with them most of the time. We provide them with food and shelter, they help us digest stuff we'd have no chance of getting into our metabolism otherwise.

If your home is full of invisible bacteria that will kill your children at any second, you may need all these chemicals to stop this dreadful contamination. Yet there are those who now think that hyper-clean environments may reduce immune system capability. Where we do seriously need to worry about hygiene is in hospitals, not most homes. Still, there is a huge amount of money to be made from scaremongering.

It is possible for sterile to be just that: sterile -inimical to life. We need a certain amount of 'dirt': and this article gets us to think about the culturally conditioned concepts 'dirt', 'clean' and how they serve to mark insider and outsider. Perhaps what we need to consider is symbolically how the dirt we despise is so often what gives us life. Literally: soil is dirt. If it's sterile it's bad news for food...