The reviews are in, and it’s official: Customers love our new Shasta mattress!

We created the Shasta so we could offer our customers a more affordable twin-size all-natural-rubber mattress made from the same certified materials we use in all our mattresses. It’s designed specifically for young children transitioning to their first adult-size mattress, and you’ll see it in our catalog offered in the twin size only.

The Shasta is filled with shredded 100%-natural rubber, utilizing remnants shaved from larger mattress cores and shredded into small pieces, helping us achieve our goal of making our Eco-Factory a waste-free facility. The shredded-rubber core is surrounded by our Naturally Safer wool, then hand-tufted with U.S.-grown certified organic cotton.

The Shasta has a feel that’s unlike anything we’ve ever made – soft yet supportive, springy and buoyant, comforting, classic, timeless.

You’ll love it too! 

Wondering about the economic viability of purchasing an organic mattress? The federal government may be able to help.

H.R. 3382, The Home Improvements Revitalize the Economy Act of 2009 — or HIRE for short — was introduced on July 29 by Rep. Henry Johnson (D-Ga.). If passed into law, it will allow a tax credit of up to $500 and deductions of up to $2K through the year 2011 for the purchase of residential building products and furnishings (up to $4K for products that meet approved environmental standards – yay Rep. Johnson! .

The bill, which is reportedly enjoying bipartisan support, is making its way through the House Ways and Means Committee. To track its progress or for more information, go to govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3382.

I took a trip with a friend last month to the Central California towns of Monterey and Salinas to attend the 29th annual Steinbeck Festival. Afterward, we drove 100 miles down the Salinas Valley, mostly on old River Road – the original El Camino Real – to visit the Paso Robles wine country.

Born in Salinas in 1902, John Steinbeck set some of his best-known stories along the massively fertile valley. During college breaks he lived and labored alongside migratory workers in the sugar-beet fields near Soledad, and their experiences inspired The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men – tales of fierce compassion for agricultural workers living on society’s margins, struggling to overcome exploitation and brutality. Steinbeck was accused of being a communist agitator and “un-American” in the 1930s for daring to suggest that the dispossessed be treated with dignity; Grapes was burned in front of the Salinas public library. It wasn’t until the 1960s that public opinion began to catch up with his thinking. In 1969, the year after he died, the same library was renamed after him.

Steinbeck loved the rugged, undeveloped beauty of the Santa Lucia coast range and its valleys. He traveled the River Road countless times. As we drove, we talked about what he might think of his home turf today. Some things haven’t changed much: the green fields in neat rows sweeping up to the foothills, the looming mountains, the old barns and adobes and frame houses. He might be surprised to see winery tasting rooms springing up in former lettuce fields or to hear Highway 101 buzzing in the distance, but for the most part we guessed he’d feel right at home.

Near the Soledad mission we were jarred from our reverie by the sight of leafy greens growing along the highway, a bilingual skull-and-crossbones sign at the end of each row reading DANGER – POISON. According to the EPA, this particular sign is reserved for pesticides with “acute toxicity,” including some that can kill humans through skin contact or inhalation. Someone down the line is going to eat that kale or spinach or radicchio, I thought, with no clue about its past. The heaviest exposure would be experienced by the workers who applied the poisons. (When another sign came along later that read “Organic Farm — Do Not Spray” it was comforting, though gale-force winds made me hope that neighbors weren’t applying anything with acute toxicity that day.)

As in Steinbeck’s time, those most affected by unethical agricultural practices are the men and women who work long hours for less-than-subsistence wages planting and tending and harvesting crops. While conditions may have improved overall since the Great Depression, we’re moving in the wrong direction when it comes to toxic exposure. Pesticides put workers’ lives at risk, and when exposure leads to illness, basic health benefits are usually lacking.

Synthetic pesticides were just starting to be developed when Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath. Since then they’ve become big business, but their stranglehold can be broken. When consumers buy organic – including products containing cotton, the most heavily pesticide-treated crop – it reduces demand for the toxins that compromise the health of our land and its people.

When we as a society stop purchasing conventionally-grown products, the market for agricultural toxins will dry up and blow away like a tumbleweed along the River Road.

What could be more American than that?

***************

To take a stand against agricultural poisons, visit panna.org. To learn more about farm working conditions, go to ufw.org.

-Sylvia, Sales Supervisor

While on the phone with customers, occasionally we’ll hear a comment such as “Lifekind — that’s a nice name. What does it mean?” We explain that our name refers to the necessity we feel to be kind to all life in the work we do, the products we offer, and the way in which the materials in those products are obtained. We explain that in part it’s a fun spin on the word “mankind,” offering a larger, more compassionate and all-inclusive meaning.

When I think about our name, the first thing that comes to mind is the Northern California wool we use in our mattresses, pillow tops, and other products. It comes from sheep that graze freely on organic pastureland and are sheared using methods that minimize anxiety and discomfort. No traumatic “sheep dipping” takes place, and sheep dogs are used to keep predators away, rather than deadly poisons.

It’s a total commitment to ethical ranching that we feel passionate about. If it’s important to you, too, you’ve come to the right place.

Sylvia, Sales Supervisor

The other day I heard a colleague say something that made me think. She was talking with a customer and describing today’s “chemical” mattress market as being a lot like the tobacco industry of the fifties. People were told back then that cigarettes weren’t bad for them, the same way today’s consumers are told that chemical flame retardants and formaldehyde-containing memory foam in mattresses aren’t just safe, but can even be good for them — and it worked like a charm. Skyrocketing cancer rates were the result.

Growing up in the seventies, with the Surgeon General’s warning on every cigarette pack, I wondered how Americans of my parents’ generation could have been so naive. How could they not have known smoking was dangerous? Sure, cigarette ads featured endorsements from beloved movie stars, cartoon characters, even the family physician (“More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand!”), but average people must have known intuitively that something was wrong. Right?

Maybe not.

I’m guessing that Americans of the forties and fifties, like us, wanted to believe that something they enjoyed was safe, and that the government would tell them if it wasn’t. Yesterday’s cigarette ads featuring leading physicians have become today’s two-page layouts for memory-foam mattresses in environmental magazines, targeting a health-oriented clientele that would run in the opposite direction if they knew what memory foam was made of.

Hazardous chemicals are a part of almost everything we use, including our mattresses, and cancer rates have never been higher. Could there be a connection? Many consumers don’t want to think so.

After all, the government would tell us if it were dangerous. Right?

(To see test results showing over 60 volatile chemicals emitting from a memory-foam mattress, see Walt Bader’s book Toxic Bedrooms:
Your Guide to a Safe Night’s Sleep, available from Lifekind.

Sylvia, Sales Supervisor