Elisa and I have a friendly rivalry about hygiene: she bathes her kids religiously every day, while I let my son go a day or two between baths. Sometimes more. My son enjoys his baths immensely, and doesn't fight them. It's just that it doesn't take much for bathtime to get bumped down our priority list. Sometimes it's due to laziness, sometimes it's busy-ness. Sometimes it's poor planning. Sometimes we just prefer to socialize.

The other day, our husbands were teasing each other about our families' respective hygiene proclivities, and Markos said in defense of Elisa's high standards, "Well, Jude always has snot running out his nose." Touché! It's true--my boy sports a glistening snail trail under his nose a good half of the winter months.

Coming to the defense of my relative "earthiness" is Katherine Ashenburg, who was recently interviewed in Salon about her latest book "The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History." Ashenburg's overview ranges around the world and the centuries, describing trends, beliefs, and methods. The Roman aqueducts, the Greek's drastic exfoliation, the German's belief in the manliness of cold showers...

In general, Europeans and Christians come out the filthiest. I may go days without bathing, but I still reside on the far end of the clean spectrum compared to the 17th century French. Skunk de pew! The belief spread throughout Europe that bathing opened your pores and let the Black Death come in, so getting wet was considered perilous.

Ashenburg believes that modern American hygiene habits are "bizarrely fastidious," and that the pendulum has swung too far, surpassing the bounds of sense. There is more pressure than ever before to wash more. At the same time, people have never needed to bathe less--or at least those of us with plenty of labor-saving devices and desk jobs. Then there's the "hygiene hypothesis," which has surfaced in several Mothertalker dairies in reference to rising rates of allergies in children.

But didn't at least one doctor you interviewed argue that the most important thing for preventing disease in terms of cleanliness -- hand washing -- is actually one that many Americans do inadequately?

Yes. That's a very good point. This was Dr. Germ, or Dr. Gerba, which is his real name. He has sent his researchers into public washrooms and found that only about 15 percent of people there actually wash long enough and with soap.

So much of our current interest in cleanliness is really about appearance and not ever smelling like a human being. If we smell like mangoes or vanilla and our face looks clean and our teeth are paper white, that's good enough. But really the one seriously disease-preventing practice of hand washing is not done enough.