The impossibility of doing better

What I talk about when I talk about the omnipresence of plastics in our food system, a new service that helps you deal with it, and the potential of eating carbon-negative.

Hello and welcome to Technically Food, my newsletter about how food decisions are changing, evolving and rotating. Welcome new subscribers and Happy Valentine’s Day to anyone looking to escape the more serious muck in our world

A few weeks ago, I asked for help on my next book. I wanted to know what your food challenges are. Many of you wrote in, and more of you still can. Here’s that newsletter to respond to.

Plastics and food came up in several comments. One reader wrote simply: “Horrible things in black plastic.” I knew what they meant. Another wrote: “Forever chemicals and plastics in our food supply!” I knew what they meant, too. This next response said it all: “I'm tortured by food packaging. I try to buy bulk, recycle, compost, wash and reuse storage bags but the single use plastics are non stop in just my own home kitchen. When I think about food packaging on a larger scale…it is a true freakin’ heartbreaker.”

Heartbreaker is right.

Image made by Deep AI. (Feedback: Perfect.)

Let’s start with the first one. Black plastic. Many of our kitchen utensils are made of black plastic that may be partially composed of fire retardant chemicals, which do transfer to food when heated. This may not be universally true, but how to know? It’s far easier to stop using them.

The problem with composition – cheap stuff made far away – is that we don’t know what’s in it. There’s little to no transparency. Last year, I interviewed Erika Schreder, the science director of Toxic-Free Future. She told me that “most materials are a black box” and there was a lack of transparency in the compounds in our kitchen.

Schreder’s suggestion, and one she said was being reviewed as an option in Europe, is to make far less complex materials. Ones that utilize fewer ingredients. “We will never be able to assess [all of] these ingredients for safety and they will much more likely harm us.” Translation: it’s easier to ditch the black plastic junk and replace it with wood or metal. Done.

(And if you’ve been following this topic for awhile there was a recent study out about black plastics that had an error in the number used for safety risk. The authors corrected their findings but still ended their report by saying there was still “high exposure potential.” Here’s a nice explainer from Ars Technica if you’d like to continue down the rabbit hole.)

Image made by Deep AI. (Feedback: Too uniform.)

Now the next one, forever chemicals and plastics in our food supply. This is the dreaded PFAS discussion, which I wrote about here in 2021. There’s nuance in the difference between forever chemicals – what’s used in making the things we eat; how our food is packaged; and the associated stream of plastic created from the simple act of eating.

A reader sent me an essay in the Guardian that follows one writer's struggle to stop buying foods in plastics for one month. She writes: “Plastic pollution is now altering some major processes at the scale of the entire Earth system,” per the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The writer is based in England, and she calls all the junk swirling around our food ‘SUP’ for single-use plastic. My eyes read standup paddleboard, which we also call SUP. (Anyone living elsewhere that calls this plastic stuff something else in shorthand? Please leave a comment below.)

The writer agonizes about the reliance of using plastics to ensure the shelf life of foods. Even her produce comes pre-bagged she bemoans. This makes me thankful to mostly shop where my produce is naked. (And it’s another reason I don’t shop at Trader Joe’s, which seems to overly rely on plastic packaging.) She vents about tea bags, which are individually wrapped, and then enclosed in a plastic bag for “freshness.” (I’ve complained about tea bags here too, but mostly because most are sealed with plastic, which when brewed in hot water creates a microplastic party we don’t want to drink.)

What my attentive reader shared with me is that the writer included a line about her own leftover routine. She wrote: I have “a cupboard full of plastic containers I reuse until they fall apart.” After writing about this topic for Sierra magazine, I switched over to glass containers. They’re heavy, bulky and not nearly as convenient. But I can put hot or cold food in them and not lose a night's sleep. I kept a few plastic containers, of which there is no good way to toss them. I use them for cut veggies, fruit and nuts. Reminder: don’t put high fat and/or hot food in plastic. Nuts are high in fat, but they’re cold or room temp.

Now the last comment, which I loved, and relates closely to the Guardian article about how mind-crushingly impossible it is to avoid plastic even when we’re intentional. In the US, there’s a business called Ridwell. In addition to dead batteries, lightbulbs and styrofoam, Ridwell collects single-layer plastic and multi-layer plastic from our homes. I’ve been trying it out and it’s been a boon to lowering my landfill waste.

Image: Ridwell.

While I try to buy less plastic, I’m still bringing it into my house more than I’d like. I have found new things I love. Toothpaste that comes in an aluminum tube. Dish scrubbers made from coconut husks. Laundry detergent sheets that allow you to never schlep home another giant plastic bottle. What I avoid: drinks in plastic bottles, gum – this one is really hard for me, and mindlessly grabbing plastic bags at the market.

Ridwell helps the end user do something different with plastic waste but its a bigger problem that should be solved by the companies selling food and the companies creating the plastics—gloves, packaging, inserts, lids, and film. This shouldn’t be a consumer problem but an everyone problem and it needs to start at the top. Schreder from Toxic-Free Future told me: “I would call on the packaging industry to come up with a plastic-free option. Many materials have been in development and its time for some of these options to start rolling out.”

If you want to try out Ridwell, here’s a promo code that will give you your first month free. (I get nothing if you sign up.) Here’s what their partners do with the stuff after they pick it up. We can’t do away with everything that may do us harm, but we can reduce our exposure.

So what do you think? Is this worth a chapter in my next book? Would you read it? What would you want me to go deep on? I hope your week has some highlights and that none of them are wrapped in plastic. Unless it’s a really good cookie.

I’m just here for the tidbits:

1. Now that we’ve solved the plastic crisis (HA!), how can we eat foods that are carbon positive for the planet? Kelp is on this list because as it grows underwater it takes in CO2. You’re probably imagining the undulating waves of green curls in our oceans. That’s macroalgae. But seaweed, which is a microalgae, is how we can eat it. Another offbeat contender: bacterial food products. (Might need a re-branding.) Solar Foods in Finland is making a yellowy-ochre hued protein from bacteria. Doesn’t sound delicious, yet. The company recently hosted a dinner at Olmsted in Brooklyn, New York. Via the BBC.

   

2. We taxed cigarettes, which helped drop the rate of smoking. We taxed soda in a few places. That’s helped too. Would you eat differently if it were much more expensive? Researchers in Germany are looking into that idea to cut back on animal meat and dairy consumption. They found that taxing these agriculturally intensive foods would drive down the consumption of dairy and meat, and cut Germany’s agricultural emissions by almost a quarter. Via Anthropocene Magazine.

3. Researchers at Michigan State University recently nosed around honey. They wanted to know: How sweet is honey, and does aroma affect how sweet it tastes? A panel of 55 tasters compared the aroma of honey to the sweetness in taste with and without nose clips. (That image!) When they could smell the aroma, the sweetness of sugar and honey was ranked closely. But with nose clips on, which blocked aromas, the tasters said the control sugar mixture was the sweetest. What does this mean? It means we can use less honey to achieve the same sweetness as sugar, but only if there’s a scent. Grain of salt, this research was supported by the National Honey Board. Via IFT.

Where you can find me:

1. My website is finally updated with my past articles. Read all about it.

2. If I don’t float away in an atmospheric river today, I’ll be back in your in-box on February 28th.