How Crunchy is Crunchy Enough?

Sometimes being crunchy can be exhausting.  I mean mentally, not physically.  If you ever got a look at me, you'd know I was built to toil in the fields, I could use some more physical exhaustion of the crunchy sort.  But navigating the road to crunchiness (or maybe that should be the road of crunchiness?) can be a real pain in the butt.

Even when you pick your battles, or fight them one at a time, I constantly worry "is this enough?"  You saw my post about local vs. organic milk, and there are all kinds of ways of determining which foods are healthiest, but my biggest internal dilemmas seem to involve bath and body products.  I buy shampoo for my kids that's free of parabens, phthalates, and sulfates, but should I be aiming to make my own out of grass clippings and hand-rendered shmaltz*?  My deodorant is aluminum-free and naturally scented, but would I be better off scrubbing my underarms with a chunk of Himalayan rock salt?  

I think I did this the wrong way around...

I started a Facebook group on a total whim, and now figured I might as well blog it too.

For a lot of frum people, the elements of living an eco-friendly, natural, etc. lifestyle can seem overwhelming or just irrelevant. When you've got a big family and keep kosher, buying organic and pasture-raised food seems prohibitively expensive. The people around you might be concerned with buying the perfect stroller, but buying the perfect baby carrier is not on the radar. You might gawk at people buying 8 days' worth of disposable utensils so that they don't have to wash dishes on Pesach, but you're the only one at Amazing Savings who thinks it's odd.