Rooty Tooty, Fresh and Arrowroot-y

This title may give away the fact that I'm a little loopy right now.  Because it's late at night (I wrote this last night) and I should be sleeping but instead, I want to share with you about the awesomeness of arrowroot powder and not wait a moment longer.  So, the original recipe that I tried called for a combination of cornstarch and arrowroot powder and because prior to this project, I had never heard of arrowroot or its powder before, I did not have any on hand.  But I powered through and googled a suitable substitute for AP.  Cornstarch.  Perfect.  I had that.  So I used that.

Doesn't this look picturesque and so...American?  Amber waves of grain and all that... I guess that would actually refer to wheat though, right?  Sadly, it's most likely GMO and being produced primarily for high fructose corn syrup, or to fatten up livestock or chickens, and the process of extracting corn starch is highly toxic.  But I didn't know that yet...well, actually I did know some of that, but it hadn't really occurred to me.  At that point, I was making this for myself.  And my first thought was...cornstarch is cheap.  So that's good.

Then, when I tossed this idea out to Facebook to see if other people were interested in natural deodorant, I wanted to make sure that I would be making a good, high-quality product.  And I went back to the original recipe and wondered...why arrowroot powder?  And I came across this: http://girlmeetsnourishment.com/arrowroot-vs-cornstarch/. Read it.  Then come back.  We will discuss.

So, still pros and cons to consider.  If this plant is native to South America, it probably did a good bit of traveling to get here.  That's bad for the environment.  But...also bad for the environment is our mono-crop plantings on vast swaths of land that is robbing the soil of life.  The whole idea of GMO frightens me and the pesticide runoff alone is maybe worse than the miles the arrowroot powder traveled.  And then there is the end result of most corn grown on American soil.  It's not for human consumption and it's often used as feed on factory farms.  So, there's that.  So... Arrowroot powder for the win!  Ever since, I've been using arrowroot powder in my own recipe that has been tweaked far enough from the original that I can consider it my own.

I leave you with some arrowroot cleaning by hand.