Glaze Safety

Right now I'm itching to make more pots along this line- the fantastic glaze however, is discontinued, it is also not the healthiest of glazes, so I'm a little reluctant to use it- even if I could find more. I love the way that the metallic feels on such an organic form- but I think I'll play around with overglazes and matte surfaces contrasted with high gloss. As soon as the babe is on a little more even keel (the last few weeks of frenzied activity and time away from mama has really messed with her schedule- plus the teeth are still coming...so that's fun) I'll start making some pots.

The issue of glaze safety is a big one for me, with young kids around I'd rather not have super toxic materials, as I'm messy, and glaze can sometimes get on clothes which can get touched by N before they get washed., no matter how concious I am of her being around, I feel better knowing that my materials are safe. Unfortunaltly though, there are a lot of potters that don't think of food safety when making their glazes, and on sculptural ware this doesn't really matter, but on food ware it can be very important. I know potters who underfire gloss glazes because they look cool when they're matte, the danger of this is leaching. Leaching happens when acidic things come into contact with the glaze (orange juice, tomato juice, coffee, tea etc. ). Even if your chemicals are 'safe'- calcium, copper, zinc- the idea of leaching is scary to me, not to mention that the more porous a glaze is the more susceptible to staining a piece is- which is not my idea of fun.

So next time you buy a homemade pot- make sure you ask about the glaze- how food safe it, what chemicals go into it, and how high it was fired. Try to stay away from porous looking glazes that are used inside dishes on the surfaces that come into direct contact with food. If there was any stained glass used as a colourant on the peice (melted in the bottom or on top) don't use that pot for eating, as some stained glass colours have lead in them. And if any of your homemade pots stains easily or fades after use, or if they bleed any colour (after filling with clean hot water the water comes away brown) stop using it, because you never know what's in it.

Epi-genetics

Last week we stumbled across a documentary on t.v. about epigenetics- I'm far from understanding all the molecular biology aspects- but the gist of it is that environmental factors can affect your genes in such a way so that they have an effect on your grandchildren. Which seems far fetched until you really think about it. In the show they were talking about the eating habits of grandparents at the time that they were producing sperm or eggs, and how that caused the quality of their sperm or eggs to be altered which causes the effect in their children (they were linking nutritional defences to diabetes in later generations)

In the Hundered Year Lie by Randall Fitzgerald- he's talking about the same type of thing except he's focusing on chemical exposure and their lasting effect on the human species. Any chemicals that I was exposed to while pregnant with N will affect her- but also since she is a girl- any chemical I was exposed to while pregnant will affect her eggs because the exposure occurred while they were being formed, and therefore it will affect my grandchildren too. For men the prime time for exposure is before puberty, when they develop sperm.

The really scary thing that the documentary pointed out was that the changes that they noticed in the offspring of lab animals who were exposed to chemicals weren't limited to one generation- the effects were passed on in different ways, indefinitely. Which means any exposure to chemicals is not only affecting us, but our entire line of descendants. Frightening stuff, it kind of puts a new impact on our attitude towards drugs and synthetics, because in a way we don't really own our genes- we just lease them. I know lots of people who expose themselvs to harmful things (myself included) with the mind-set that they're only hurting themselves, but apparantly that just isn't so.