At McDonald’s, I saw that their sweet tea comes from a plastic bag inside a metal container, which stays in there all day. That doesn’t seem sanitary. Then I found out some places, like Olive Garden, heat soup in plastic bags by putting them in hot water. Isn’t this like leaving a water bottle in a hot car, where plastic leaches into the liquid? How is this okay? Like, I feel like that would be so explicitly illegal in other countries. Taking a big plastic bag of soup and just throwing it in water for the plastic to obviously separate from the bag and be intermingled with the food…
It sounds a lot like poison, like it’s literally poisonous. Like how is this okay in the USA?
Wait till you hear the chlorine washed chicken news!
Chickens in the USA are typically “battery chickens”, which is actually about as brutal as it sounds. They’re kept in way too small spaces, unable to move around, and stand and sit in their own feces all day.
The chlorine wash helps them pass lab tests for lack of pathogens, because small amounts of chlorine get onto the test samples and kill the bacteria, but the chlorine is only surface deep. Salmonella is endemic, and many chickens’ undersides are actually rotting from being in their own filth all day. But if the bacteria test passes, it’s fine and the big corporation buying the cheap chicken doesn’t care.
Salmonella infections and food poisoning generally are relatively high as a result of these kind of profit-driven practices.
The boil in the bag thing isn’t a big deal by comparison, but no, the USA does not have strong food safety standards, the USA has strong lobbying and openly legal corporate funding of politicians that would be seen as corruption in many other countries.
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Also, it’s sanitary.
Remind me to not get you a Sous Vide kit for chistmas.
i have a sous vide machine. it always feels so extremely wastedul to use, but it does make really good food. i wish there was an alternative to plastic that i could use :(
I’ve never done sous vide myself, but I’ve heard canning jars can work as well.
Depends what you’re making.
My jar steak always comes out great!
companies are very averse to lawsuits, so they will toe the line of what is legal. the FDA is supposed to maintain what is legal or not based on safety, but conservatives in this country are always trying to blur those rules for monetary gain.
that said, with regards to plastics there are many ‘food-grade’ plastics designed for these specific use cases.
id be curious of what other countries are more strict when it comes to the FDA. I’ve seen it about on-par with other 1st world nations. theres always a bit of differentiation when it gets to some specifics, but overall the US is better off than 95% of the planet.
now with the orange turd back in office, i suspect that will drop precipitously as they dismantle important organizations like the FDA and the department of education.
your ignorance of chemistry does not mean there are no standards.
McDonald’s itself is poison.
Fun thing I learned recently: You know that pigs’ feed is made with whole bags of expired bread that are ground up? It’s too expensive in labor to take the bread out of the bag so they’re ground up, plastic and all. You think that doesn’t make it’s way into the meat that we eat?
If it makes you feel any better, this happens in the UK, too.
If it makes you feel any better, this happens in the UK, too.
That did make me feel better, thanks! 😃
We do; but fuck if anyone actually follows it and the FDA is corrupt as fuck.
But also the plastic thing? We barely found out everything has micro plastics in it and don’t even know how harmful it is yet. Hindsight is always 20/20.
This is a very complex and nuanced issue seeing as plastics as a class of materials can vary greatly in its manufacturing process and if any coatings are used. Some materials have varing use cases, also new materials, coatings, and process combinations are created constantly. Additionally a material might not have noticeable effects on a person for 10+ years.
The American government could pass legislation and studies could be done for both old and new materials and manufacturing process with an introduction of an approval and inspection process. However, did you know that worrying about what corporations do to Americans is “woke”?
Telling corpos not to poison is also gay, real men just take the corpo dick, no questions asked. You just say no homo, everything is 100% straight here
You’re worried about a little plastic in a beverage with (probably) 50g added sugar? 2g of sodium and 40g fat but a little microplastic puts you off the soup?
Get a grip, honestly.
You’re not wrong. That sugar and sodium is going to do a lot to the human body. However I think we should understand what plastics (especially when heated) do too.
Microplastics stay in the body forever, fats, carbs and salts don’t.
Cooking a food in a sealed plastic bag is referred to as “Sous Vide”, and was invented in 1974 by the french. It can also be performed in a glass jar, so we definitely could remove the plastic from the equation, but there are “food safe plastics” which have been demonstrated to have no known health issues when used for this purpose.
Some plastics, like BPA or PVC, are dangerous to consume/do easily leach into food/water, but “plastic” is a very broad term that refers to a lot of different materials.
Note: microplastics are a whole different story, and we’re not really sure how bad they are for you. It is perfectly reasonable to ask the question, but society at large has essentially decided the convenience outweighs the risk, and good luck trying to avoid it in your food.
I’m willing to bet that you’ll get more microplastics from the food itself (meat, plants, water) than the bag.
Some plastics are more stable than others. That said, we are admittedly far too lackadaisical with them in general.
To answer your direct question, we do have an FDA that does a passable job with some things, salmonella outbreaks, emergency vaccine development, stuff like that. There is probably some regulatory capture at play, though, where business interests get their people appointed into oversight roles. When a full half of our government is so vocally and rabidly pro-business, this is difficult to prevent in the long run.
A plastic bag in a metal container sounds about as sanitary as it gets. It’s far better to keep the tea in a sterile bag until it’s needed rather than pouring it into another, potentially contaminated, container and storing it there.
Based on your post let me ask you this: what would be more sanitary? Just to show this isn’t a post in bad faith
Not sure if you’re aware, but sanitary just means that there’s no microbial growth that would cause illness.
That’s a separate food from plastics leeching.
That’s not what the dictionary definition of sanitary is. Seriously, go look it up. According to Merriam-Webster, it first says: Of or relating to health. Plastic leaching into stuff is not healthy. No one has ever proved that it’s safe. The burden of proof is always proving that something is harmful, and then it’s classified as harmful. The problem is, we don’t know something is harmful for decades, or longer. People literally believed that it was safe to have cocaine in Coca-Cola and that cigarettes were completely harmless. We also believe that vaping is not harmful, and that marijuana isn’t harmful either. Who knows if that’ll be discovered as being extremely harmful to your health in 100 years or so.
So to me personally, I don’t find it sanitary to involve something in the process that you have no idea whatsoever if it affects your health or not. I would call that unsanitary.
Merriam-Webster, copied in for reference.
adjective
Of or relating to health or the protection of health.
Free from elements, such as filth or pathogens, that endanger health; hygienic.
“sanitary conditions for the preparation of food.”
Of or pertaining to health; designed to secure or preserve health; relating to the preservation or restoration of health; hygienic. See the Note under sanatory.
“sanitary regulations”
See under Commission.
Of, or relating to health.
Clean and free from pathogens; hygienic.
Free from filth and pathogens.
“a sanitary washroom”
You’re right, there is a usage of it to mean “healthy” in general, my bad.
However, I hope you can understand that it isn’t the most common usage, and that the bulk of the definitions and usages are pathogen related. Hence me either forgetting or not having run across its more broad usage.
I’d still use a different word, but I definitely agree with your point under that usage :)
That being said, sometimes something that’s not sanitary (using the general definition now) may still be the better option than something that’s worse.
Which is the case here, imo.
When you’re dealing with something like a soda/cola, you’re very often dealing with a slightly corrosive liquid. When that’s the case, you’re limited in what you can use to ship and store it in. Glass, obviously, is the superior choice in terms of maximum safety for chemical exposure. It is also much more expensive to ship, and has more bulk for storage. It also has a different kind of safety issue; the extra weight and the risk of damage leading to injury rather than just a mess.
The problem is the lack of choice for patrons. We can’t say “give me a glass bottle instead” and get one. It’s out of the bag-in-a-box or nothing these days.
As far as comparisons to other potential chemical exposures, the ones you listed in specific are a personal choice to take in at all. Whereas sodas, people might not be aware of the fact that they’re served from plastics. That doesn’t negate your point, it’s just an interesting distinction. The plastics in food storage is more like second hand smoke than smoking because it isn’t something you can explicitly choose to engage in, and opting out is problematic.
Mind you, I’m not certain that the plastics leeched into a soda are at a high enough level to be worse than the soda itself. They’re distinctly not sanitary, no matter what they’re stored in. Too much sugar, too much acidity, too many colorants and flavorants that are either neutral, or haven’t been excluded completely as possibly unhealthy. Just the caffeine levels in them are problematic, and the problems from the sugar levels will show up in your body years ahead of the plastics. But, again, you’re choosing to drink them, but may not be aware of the plastics to opt out.
Fwiw, my household has phased out plastics entirely for anything that gets heated, and for long term storage. We just don’t buy new containers as they reach end of life, and any food that comes in plastics gets moved to one of our glass or metal containers if the product is going to be sitting around for more than a week or so. Longer if it’s a dried product, since leeching rates for those approaches zero in anything under years. Which is only relevant so you understand that I agree with you that there’s no such thing as a totally food safe plastic.
Soup in plastic bags is the standard in most industrial kitchens all over the world.
Especially when you heat them ‘au bain marie’ it’s safe-ish. I don’t store food in plastic containers because even food grade plastic leaches but it’s generally allowed.
The sugar in the sweet tea is probably far more dangerous than its food-grade packaging
