The Kitchen Shelf (2026)

Two new paperbacks — baking soda and castor oil

In 1924, Arm & Hammer distributed a twenty-eight-page booklet to physicians describing sodium bicarbonate as clinical medicine — for influenza, kidney disease, gastric distress, uric acid disturbances, respiratory illness, and the general support of the body’s cleansing processes. Arm & Hammer, as the manufacturer, could not distribute that booklet today. The substance is unchanged. What changed is the regulatory environment, which now restricts what manufacturers of unpatentable compounds can say about them.

Two of those compounds are the subject of the two books out today. Both were in every kitchen. Both were routine medicine for generations. Both were quietly written out of the professional conversation as the drug model took over. Neither has stopped working. Neither is expensive. Neither is new. What they are is recovered.

Baking Soda: The Terrain Book on the Compound Medicine Forgot

Buy on Lulu → · 289 pages · USD $19.99

This is a brand new book, available now for the first time.

Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework that industrial medicine buried. It maps what the compound does at the level of the blood, the kidneys, the lungs, the digestion, the mouth, the skin, and the acidic tissue that industrial modernity produces. It is honest about what bicarbonate cannot do, and about what must accompany it — hydration, minerals, breath, the removal of what is driving the acidity in the first place — for the framework to actually work.

Across eighteen chapters and three Q&A appendices, the book covers the physiology, the historical burial of the terrain framework, and the specific applications: respiratory, kidney, digestive, athletic, dental, transdermal baths, and cancer — where bicarbonate is documented in research on altering the tumour microenvironment.

The compound is cheap. The compound is in every grocery store. The compound is one of the safest substances in general medical and household use. And it has been progressively excluded from the professional medical conversation while remaining freely available to any reader willing to acquire it and understand what it does.

For the family that wants a single reference on a compound they already own. For the reader who has heard terrain mentioned and wants to see it in practice on a substance they can hold.

A word on the second edition

The next book, Castor Oil, first appeared as a digital edition earlier this year. Readers of that first edition should know that the print edition is substantially different — not a reprint, but a second edition, revised and expanded.

The revision is substantial — restructured from the ground up. The clinical record of Dr. William McGarey’s A.R.E. Clinic — the largest single body of documented castor oil practice in modern medicine — is now integrated throughout rather than referenced. Barbara O’Neill’s contemporary teaching from her retreat in the New South Wales mountains sits alongside it. Ulric Williams’s surgical observations from 1930s New Zealand, Edgar Cayce’s Palma Christi tradition, D.C. Jarvis’s Vermont folk practice, and the terrain framework as taught by Tom Cowan are all woven in.

Ten appendices give you the pack construction, the McGarey survey, companion kitchen remedies, sourcing and quality, protocols for the first month, frequently asked questions, and the Vermont tradition. A full index sends you to what you need. If you have the first edition on your screen, this is the version you keep on the shelf.

The Castor Oil Book: The Kitchen Medicine That Nearly Disappeared

Buy on Lulu → · 220 pages · USD $19.99 · Second Edition, Revised and Expanded

Castor oil is the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about. Not because it stopped working — it didn’t. Because a two-dollar bottle from the pharmacy doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures. So it faded into the background, and with it, four thousand years of documented practice.

This book recovers that practice.

Twenty-two chapters cover kidney stones, appendicitis, liver congestion, fibroids, adhesions, breast conditions, chest conditions, the male terrain, and pediatric applications. The clinical observations behind each are documented. The protocols are given in full. The limitations are stated honestly. The reader is trusted to read the record and decide what to do with it.

For the household that wants one honest reference on a compound already in the cupboard. For the person who has been told there is nothing to be done and wants to see what four thousand years of practice actually documents.

The shelf

Ten books now. More coming.

The first five took on specialisms trained not to see the thing they treat — motherhood, vaccination, dentistry, veterinary medicine, psychiatry. The next three took on suppressed remedies and the germ-theory question underneath — DMSO, chlorine dioxide, and No Contagion (co-authored with Jamie Andrews). These two take on something quieter and closer to home: the compounds already in the kitchen, and the framework that makes them make sense.

That framework has a name. Terrain. It is what medicine looked like before the drug model, and what medicine will need to look like again if it is going to address the chronic disease that the drug model has produced. Each of these books is a piece of that recovery.

The books are printed to order and shipped worldwide from Lulu. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming.

A note of thanks

None of this shelf would exist without the people carrying it. Those of you who bought one book to try it, then came back for a second. Those buying two or three at a time. Those buying the full set, sometimes more than one copy of the same title to give to a friend or a parent. I see every order. Each one is a real person deciding that this work is worth space on their shelf and dollars from their week. Thank you. I do not take that lightly.

— Unbekoming