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You rub it on your face and all over your body every day; millions are spent advertising its scent and its purity. Yet, you might not know what went into your bar of soap. Intrepid (and very clean) investigator Jean Thaler rolled up her sleeves to find the dirt on soap.

A Tale of Tallow
In by-product lingo, the fats from the kidney and other organs are called “killing fats” since they are obtained during the slaughter of the hogs, cattle and sheep. The “cutting fats” are the ones removed when the carcasses are parcelled up. Pork lard comes mostly from the fatty layers in the back and in the belly muscles. Pieces of fat are rendered into oil by heating them.

Since we are going to put this grease into our food or candles or onto our faces, we’ll call it tallow. Be assured that the fats in food come from fresh and clean animals, and in any case these fats have been deodorized by steaming. In this country, the fats from downed or otherwise disqualified animals are banned from human consumption. In food, that is.

If you bought your bar of soap at your grocery, notice that the first ingredient is sodium tallowate. The soap was produced from a mixture of mostly inedible tallows with coconut oils, the tallows comprising 75-85% of the fat.

I asked a customer service rep at Proctor & Gamble: “Why do ads for Ivory Soap call it ‘pure’?”

“Ivory Soap has no colorants or other additives. It’s just soap.” 

“What do you mean by ‘just soap’?”

“Ivory Soap is made just from animal fat and vegetable oil.”

“Can’t it be made from vegetable oil alone?”

“Ivory Soap wouldn’t work, wouldn’t serve any purpose, without the animal fat.”

Wrong. Soap is sodium salts of fat, which are produced, along with glycerol, when fat reacts with caustic soda or lye. This chemical reaction is called saponification. Cattle, whales, vegetables, seaweed, synthetic compounds and Holocaust martyrs all have been turned into soap.

Today’s soap factories look like petroleum refineries, on a smaller scale. Fatty gravies are boiled then dried in awesome arrays of vats and tubes. To produce opaque soaps, glycerol and other by-products of saponification are pulled out. To produce transparent soaps, nothing is pulled out, and sugar solutions may be added to increase the clarity. In the transparent process, if potash replaces the caustic soda, the result is liquid soap. Nothing about the modern process requires that the fat come from animals.

From the manufacturer’s point of view, the advantage of tallow is its much lower cost. Arguably, some consumers could notice that soaps from tallow tend to be harder, due to tallow’s higher boiling point.

Tradition is another reason soap production depends so heavily on tallow. Fats from animals were almost always the most easily extracted. Soaps made out of tallow and of lye from wood ashes are believed to date back 5000 years. Tallow soaps were consumed by Romans, documented by Pliny and Galen, revived in the cities of medieval Europe.

Tallow soaps have been popular in America since the colonial period. They became well-known in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but taxes kept the prices high despite falling costs of production. In fact, the English tax was not repealed until 1853.

Proctor and Gamble has set the tone for the soap industry since 1938, when it introduced a technology that could produce bars of soap in a matter of hours. Now P&G spearheads campaigns to convince the public that product-testing on animals is necessary and humane.

According to In Defense of Animals, Proctor & Gamble kills over 50,000 animals a year in product testing. Toxic chemicals are force-fed to dogs, dripped into the eyes of rabbits, and applied to the shaved skin of guinea pigs. Without sedation or painkillers. It is only the fear of liability litigation which perpetuates these tests — they are not required by law or regulation.

On a personal note, I urge my fellow Jewish vegetarians to wash cruelty-free, to be truly kosher inside and out. In the Kosher laws of Judaism, any prolongation of the animal’s death agony makes meat unclean. Technically, these laws do not apply to soap, except for dishwashing detergent. To me, all meat and meat-based soap is unclean. To persons of all persuasions, I leave you with this line from a hard-core band, Dead Silence: “I want this to sink into your head/The face you wear is leaving animals dead.”

Please use clean soap.

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