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?
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!
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! 😃
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
This post is all over the place, conflating plastic leeching with sanitary concerns, throwing out vague concerns and then panicking that there must be NO standards. To really answer it would require giving someone a comprehensive education in food safe materials science, likely fighting though many dearly-held misconceptions along the way. Anyone who thinks that plastic touching food is a health risk must have all their meals brought to them on a plate, and have no idea how food is delivered to stores or packaged for sale.
The question was rhetorical, I never expected OP to reply. Based on his other replies he’s just doing what he’s paid to do
look up preprepared pasteurized food, it will be an eye opener. you can pop a can of campbell chunky soup and eat it cold. science is amazeballs.
Those canned soups are precooked and just need to be heated up. Well, they don’t need to be heated up, as you said. That’s just to make it more enjoyable.
first the bag thing is not even remotely a us only thing, and second heating food in plastic is sanitary (bc that refers to cleanliness). idk what term would be best for heating food in plastic, but I do agree it should be banned.
Sous vide?
I had forgotten about that… maybe instead of banning it outright it should be restricted to plastics that are certified heating-safe. in hindsight that should’ve been my take from the start as it aligns much better with my political views (in this case, it matters that I believe most things should only be restricted and not banned outright, an easy example being substances like weed and alcohol).
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.
Lol, no.
And within the next four years, it’ll be non-existent.
People pay a lot of money in fancy restaurants to have their food cooked in a plastic bag lol
Ah yes. Sous vide enters the chat
Nobody tell them about aluminium soda cans
Or about freezing nearly expired foods.
Maybe you should make sure this doesn’t happen in other industrial countries before shitting on the US
Ya you’re being poisoned no matter where you live. Get used to it.
USA bad. Uplemmy left
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.
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.
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.
Your post is unsanitary then because it is making me stupider and that is bad for my mental health, and mental health is health just like dental health is health.
Using the dictionary definition of a term like sanitary when applying it to an industry with its own specific definition, food prep, makes your argument seem like it is a bad faith argument. I don’t think that is your intent here, I just want to bring to your attention that your point will be missed if you use a term with multiple contextual meanings in & out of industry since it makes the argument linguistic rather than point by point.
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.
