Clorox extends its product uses. (Warning: yucky ideas ahead.)

I saw the headline “Clorox Pushing New Uses for its Brands” and my inner Hannah Housewife (which I wasn’t even aware I had) asked herself: just what can you do with Clorox other than bleach your husband’s underwear or clean the toilet?

Well, I for one wasn’t aware that the Clorox empire extends so far beyond bleach. The company’s:

… brands include Brita water filters, Burt’s Bees skin-care products, Fresh Step cat litter, Green Works cleaners, and Kingsford charcoal.

As well as Glad bags, barbecue sauce, and Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing.

I must admit that this last one gave me pause.

Was Hidden Valley Ranch “discovered” by some miraculous product development accident – like the one in which Borden’ experimenting with coffee cleaner yielded Elmer’s Glue-all? Was Hidden Valley the product of Clorox trying to come up with a chlorine bleach that wouldn’t leach the color out of everything that it came in contact with, like those nice blue shorts I had in the 1980’s, thank you!

Well, yuck!

Not that I eat a lot of Hidden Valley Ranch anything (although I will confess to having used the dip mix), but any association with Clorox definitely puts me off a food stuff.

So I won’t be doing what Clorox wants me to do to extend the Hidden Valley Ranch brand, and that’s use it as a dip for pizza. Clorox:

…began marketing its Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing as a sauce for frozen-food items after noticing that consumers were pouring it on pizza, vegetables, and chicken wings.

Even though you’re much better off staying in the raw, or dipping in yogurt-based something or other, I get the dip your veggies into Hidden Valley Ranch dressing.  And perhaps even a chicken wing.

But pizza?

Doesn’t pizza – which I love – kind of stand alone as an all-encompassing, not great for you, have it on occasion, tastes yummy treat that works perfectly well without gooping it up with ranch dressing?

Come on, people!  What’s wrong with good old sausage, onion and peppers? Or even something more “healthful” and exotic like spinach, broccoli, and feta?

Isn’t pizza perfectly good on its own, without doctoring it up with high calorie dressing? Talk about food malpractice. And talk about the wisdom of crowds: NOT!

What’s good for Clorox – getting consumers to buy more of your products – is not necessarily good for America.

Not that I’m a weightist or anything, but doesn’t Clorox know there’s an obesity epidemic on.

From a public health perspective, Clorox would be a better corporate citizen if they advised us of a dietary practice in which we ate our fill of pizza, and instead of taking the final piece and dousing it with Hidden Valley, we’d sprinkle it with Clorox, rendering it inedible and the extra calories moot.

But Clorox wants growth, and expanding the use of Hidden Valley is one of the big ideas that they’re counting on.

Another is vanilla-scented trash bags.

Gag!

The only vanilla-scented anything I can abide is, well, vanilla.

My fear would be that vanilla trash bags would attract more rats. (Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a “city fear.”)

But the scented bags are apparently working, as “Clorox lifted sales of Glad trash bags last quarter by adding fragrances.”

Here’s an idea: how about making the trash bags smell vaguely like bleach: a good, clean smell that I’m guessing rats won’t like.

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One of my mother’s crafty things – mostly done in service of producing goods for the annual school bazaar, projects that we were dragooned into working on  – was the creation of a Clorox bottle piggy bank. Good to know that, fifty years on, this craft hasn’t died out, and there’s even an online video that shows you how to make one.

I have to say that the bank in the video is one pretty crappy looking piggy bank. It looks like a kid made it, which may be the point. Ours were much cuter. We didn’t paint the pigs, we decorated the bodies with flowers cut out of felt, and surrounded the coin slot with felt, as well, for a much more professional finish.  I like her use of spools for the legs, however. We used felt covered corks, which worked just fine. But spools are a reasonably good alternative. Occasionally we used golf tees for legs, but this was an inferior product when compared with corks. (Why didn’t we have corks? Was there a cork shortage? And where did the corks come from anyway? It’s not like my parents drank wine, although they did keep a bottle of Maneschevitz around for an occasionally wine cooler.)

I also know how to make a planter out of tuna cans and clothespins, if anyone’s interested….