When I was a kid, I remember my dad throwing out teflon pans once they'd chipped. He believed it caused cancer if the coating got into your food.

I mostly cook on iron. But these chemicals are in almost all food packaging, too.

The thing is, they have been for almost 50 years. The trouble is that the damage they're doing is not noticeable on the scale of a few years, fast enough to force a change in policy, the way it was with saccharine or Thalidomide or DDT. So this may be one of those things people look back at in 2,000 years and say "this is what was in their water that brought down their civilization". But on the scale of one or two generations, it's going to be hard to prove what portion of the increase in cancers and birth defects these chemicals actually caused.

I'd support a total ban, but it seems that governments are just chipping away around the edges of the problem.