Fast-food wrappers and packaging that contain so-called forever chemicals are no longer being sold in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday.
It’s the result of a voluntary effort with U.S. food manufacturers to phase out food contact packaging made with PFAS, the acronym for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which do not degrade and can harm human health.
Starting in 2020, the FDA obtained commitments from U.S. food manufacturers to phase out PFAS in wrappers, boxes and bags with coating to prevent grease, water and other liquids from soaking through.
Cool. Now do plasticizers.
(Because to replace PFAS, they swapped in plastic coatings and all the chemicals that come with that.)
I mean…BPA sure…but all plasticizers? You can’t have plastics without plasticizers.
If you’re saying you want to ban all plastics from the food and beverage industry, that’s a different matter altogether, and a wildly impractical one at that.
Yes. It’s a bold statement, and regardless of practicality, it is what I believe.
I’m of the mind that all plastic is unsafe anywhere near the human food chain.
My reasoning is simple, and very folksy, but I trust it.
Humans are carbon-based. As is all life on earth. Plastic is derived from petroleum products. Petroleum is more or less essence of carbon-based life-forms.
Intrinsic to humans (as well as all life on earth), petroleum, and plastics, are chemical structures called cyclic compounds. That’s the carbon ring structure you see in glucose, gasoline, and polystyrene.
To modify the properties of plastic, the chemicals you add to it must be capable of interacting with that cyclic compound.
And therefore, they are also capable of interacting with the carbon ring structure that underpins all of our biology.
Sure, it’s possible to create plastics that only leech a little of these compounds, but the most useful properties of plastics are their flexibility. I don’t believe it’s possible to create a plastic material that is pliable without also being easily compromised at a molecular level - which is to say - easily leeching the plasticizers and other chemicals used to impart the desired properties.
I think you should get less “folksy” and more informed and realistic about our modern food industries.
Plastics play an enormous role and are absolutely essential.
Your position is like someone saying they want steel out of construction, since it rusts.
Sigh.
Rust? Steel? Building materials?
I’m talking about plastics in contact with the food we consume, not whatever that is. Stay on topic.
My position is that chemicals that act on plastics also act on our biology, and we know that because there are studies that prove it.
Using a heuristic to explain why I believe plastics should not be in our food chain is not uninformed. You’ll note, though, that I said my belief stands regardless of impracticality, and I explicitly did not assert that it would be possible to remove plastics from food processing.
So - that’s where I am. I stated a belief. And I used the word “folksy” because “heuristic” makes me sound like an insufferable know-it-all. (But discussing organic chemistry probably made me seem like one, anyway.)
In your rabid pursuit of ‘winning’ you failed to understand my comment or intent. You challenged nothing I said nor said anything of substance in your response. You focused on arguing against things I did not state, reaffirmed prior statements you made that I did not challenge, and made a completely irrelevant and hyperbolic characterization of me as a person.
I have no interest in arguing my beliefs with someone who is clearly incapable of challenging them.
It’s okay, buddy. I still respect you as a human. Ta.
I wasn’t trying to “win” anything, just to sort of gently get a feel for whether you were simply ignorant or an actual legitimate idiot…and now I know.