Do not put plastic in the microwave | Hacker News Reader

Do not put plastic in the microwave

bonappetit.com

> If he “was on a deserted island and [plastic] was all that was available,” Rogers says he’d opt for types two [High-Density Polyethylene] and five [Polypropylene]. These are both higher density formulas, used to contain liquids and manufacture items like the rigid plastic forks dispensed at your local takeout restaurant. They have a higher melting point, “and they also don’t tend to chip or shatter as much,” says Rogers. (Still, Hussain’s team found these types of containers shed plenty of microplastics when heated.)

This the part I feel should be focused on. HDPE is notable for being safe to handle during its entire lifecycle, from production to use to recycling. Even when pushed well past its softening point, it does not create any hazardous fumes. A sustainable future does not mean avoiding the use of plastics entirely, it means identifying which are the most useful in the long-term.

PE and PP are also the cheapest and most common plastics.

They are NOT very stiff, tho.

HDPE is very stiff, MDPE is kinda stiff and LDPE is flimsy. Same monomer just cross linked differently with a different production process. Plastic is chemistry magic.

It's just carbon and hydrogen chains. How complex can it be? Surely not so complex to require its own field.

For those unaware of the joke, Organic Chemistry is quite complex. Hydrogen+Carbon can make plastic or Gasoline depending on the details of how it chains.

I’m aware, but HDPE is less stiff than other commodity plastics like ABS or PLA.

Nalgene make HDPE water bottles now. They’re really durable. I’ve had two as my daily use bottles for about 4 years and they’re as durable or more durable than the hard plastic Nalgene bottles I used before.

They've made HDPE bottles for a while. When I was guiding canoe trips 20 years ago, the wisdom among the guides was that the HDPE ones will float, even if you fully submerge them with the cap off, whereas the Lexan ones will sink.

Aren’t the HDPE Nalgene the original one carried in the 90s, then polycarbonate came out, whoops BPE then transition to Lexan?

I loved the HDPE and appreciated it was likely the most inert (aren’t milk jugs HDPE?), but my family says it imparts a taste so we have a ton of Lexan.

Lexan is a brand of polycarbonate.

Given one I purchased became brittle and shattered a few years after I bought it, I'd dispute that.

probably fine just don't drink hot soup/coffee out of it. I've long since switched over to a glass lined beverage container after I found out about microplastics.

PE are essentially just really long fats.

This is false. PE is made up of hydrocarbon chains. Fats are made of fatty acids esterified to a polyol backbone, commonly glycerol.

If we're talking about chemical consequences of alkanes vs carboxylic acids, yes. However, the parent topic is talking about the effect of burning plastics, for which consideration it can be thought of as burning fat in that it (as opposed to other plastics where the byproduct cannot be compared to just burning fat.

"Still, Hussain’s team found these types of containers shed plenty of microplastics when heated.)"

Most jails and prisons only have plastic containers for microwaving your food, because anything else would be a "security risk."

When I was inside the only "cup" you could buy was a plastic storage container that was not food- or microwave-safe but was used for everything from drinking coffee to cooking noodles.

what security risk would a polystyrene cup pose, a choking hazard?

polystyrene is a plastic.

Amazon referral link to the glass containers. The real question is: how many of these articles are complete BS just to sell a product?

Definitely Do Not trust what you read when there is a referral link.

Agree the potential bias is unfortunate

Yeah, this company does the same thing at Ars Technica, putting up long lists of Amazon affiliate links whenever it’s Prime Day.

They're expensive, too. At least when epicurious ran a similar article, they also recommended wide-mouth ball jars.

The biggest problem for me is cabinet space. The jars don't stack compactly, and the glass lock tend to live up to their name if you try to stack them.

I once got a brandy snifter wedged into a Pyrex measuring cup (don't ask, I don't remember what I could have possibly been doing to arrange this).

I filled the brandy snifter with ice, water, and salt, and dunked the outside of the measuring cup in hot water. It loosened the assembly enough to get it apart without destroying the brandy glass.

I have a set of pyrex bowls that I bought in 1987, and still use today. I wouldn't bother with wide mouth jars, although I guess they have advantages when storing food in the fridge.

I have a couple of these pyrex bowls that I took when I left home for Uni some decades ago and they were already some decades old. I have no lid for them so I cover them with regular plates or with a wooden chopping board (even when I microwave them), with the upside that with the board as a cover I can stack another bowl on top in the fridge.

But for food heating I find it very easy to just take the food from whatever container it’s in and put it in a regular bowl which I can microwave covered by a plate to contain the inevitable food explosion.

Every one of the few times I microwaved even in high quality plastic containers they became soft and harder to handle. Also I always had the (probably very subjective) feeling that it subtly changes the taste of the food. Kind of how bottled water tastes when the PET bottle is left in the sun for a while.

Anyway, I find the bowl+plate as an infinitely reusable option, easy to clean, and just takes a bit of extra care handling when hot. Also bowls and plates stack very nicely in the cupboard and not too expensive in IKEA.

> microwave covered by a plate to contain the inevitable food explosion

The default (maximum) power setting dumps so much energy so fast into the water in your food that some of it boils, and the expanding steam spatters food everywhere. This is also what causes the "burned on the outside, still cold in the middle" effect with leftovers, which aren't engineered to be microwaved on high the way most frozen packaged meals are.

Use a lower power setting for longer, and pause to stir if possible. That way there's more time for the heat to dissipate into the bulk of whatever you're microwaving, and few to no tiny, messy steam explosions.

I actually use lower power in multiple shorter “sessions” with some minutes in between, which even without stirring lets the heat transfer more uniformly through the food - almost exclusively leftovers.

I discovered this accidentally since usually I go about other stuff while heating the food in the microwave (not the stove) and more often than not I completely forget about it even with the “ding”. Putting it though another session at low power, I noticed, makes the food very uniformly heated.

But ever so often after a while heating there’ll be the random drop of water under some fat or something like that, and without a lid it will paint the inside of the oven a lovely shade of splatter. No downside with covering the food.

I've never microwaved wood, but I'm going to start, thanks!

I use a cutting board that’s a single piece of oak if I remember correctly (no gluing of multiple blocks like with many bamboo boards). I did also use the typical bamboo board but the adhesive mixed with heat and steam made me a bit uneasy. Not sure how healthy that is, or how well one of those would take too many repeated partial (mostly above the bowl) heating cycles.

> “Personally, I avoid heating food in any plastic with an automatic default to glassware.” Beyond never microwaving food in plastic, Vandenberg hopes people simply stop using it. She says, “The market will provide us with alternatives if we just don’t buy plastic.”

I find really astonishing how the article demonizes plastic and ends recommending glassware use, placing a product referral that have PLASTIC lids. Shouldn't we stop using it?

In the wild, most of the glass food storage containers that I see have silicone lids, not plastic lids.

In any case, the problem here is when food comes into contact with plastic, which is not happening regularly with lids unless you store your food upside-down.

All my Pyrex lids are plastic. I'm away from home at the moment and can't check, but some "search engine research" suggests BPA-free #7 (the "other" category) plastic. I've seen glass lids with silicone seals, but never a fully silicone lid.

I'm not spending a lot of time microwaving those lids, though.

From the Wikipedia article: "Silicone compounds are pervasive in the environment. Particular silicone compounds, cyclic siloxanes D4 and D5, are air and water pollutants and have negative health effects on test animals. They are used in various personal care products. The European Chemicals Agency found that "D4 is a persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) substance and D5 is a very persistent, very bioaccumulative..." So maybe silicones aren't great either

unless you have proof that the silicone in your drinking container leaches into your drink, then I'm unsure what you're saying has any relevance.

Well since we were talking about replacing plastic lids with silicone it seems relevant.

> In the wild, most of the glass food storage containers that I see have silicone lids, not plastic lids.

A quick survey of "glass containers" on amazon and walmart does not corroborate this claim.

You should not be putting the food in microwave with lids, plastic or silicone. Glassware with those lids are fine for storage.

Plenty of things are microwaved with the lid loosened or gently placed on top. That's certainly not a general rule.

A paper or light cloth towel suffices in place of a lid in every circumstance I've run across. Barring almost ready to eat meals in plastic containers designed for microwaving (which I use exceedingly rarely), plastic never enters my microwave.

I typically put a plate on top. Wouldn't trust paper or cloth to not ignite in the microwave?! At least my gf thinks I'm crazy to put things in the microwave that contain cloth or paper at all, and I don't know that it's safe for more than a few seconds. Food that I store in the freezer in glass containers typically needs heating for at least five minutes, usually more depending on amount

I can verify that paper towels will not combust after multiple minutes in the microwave. I usually dampen a (clean) hand towel to wrap/steam tortillas (under 40 seconds) and have never had an issue with that either.

I'm not sure that a dry cloth has enough microwave cross section (for lack of the proper term) to heat significantly, and a damp cloth therefore wouldn't go above boiling point. I'll experiment in my cheap office microwave.

Why do you think a paper towel would ignite? This has never been an issue for me. I use a paper towel which often times I can use for my hands or mouth after eating.

I'm doing it as well because I though it would be fine (I was mostly wary of BPA leaking from the plastic to my food so it didn't seem too big of a problem to microwave it), but that's a habit that you can change if you know about the risk. (And manufacturers should be mandated to engrave a warning in the lid “do not microwave” so that people are &actually made aware of it).

Ironically I always put the lid in for protection so food doesn't explode and stain the oven. Guess that was a bad idea.

I don't think using a lid is a bad idea, like a plate or so, but maybe not the plastic you were trying to avoid in the first place!

for that, use an external/separate cover purpose built for this purpose

The lid is not in (much) contact with the food, so there's no leeching, plus you can remove it when microwaving.

That's why I'm surprised there isn't more of a push for Corningware. Have we all forgotten? Porcelain containers with glass lids, everyone in the 80s has them. They last forever unless you manage to shatter them.

Mechanicisms matter. The article talked about plastic HEATING allowing it to leach into food that it’s TOUCHING. If you’re lids are not heating or touching food, maybe it’s fine?

Counter example could be condensation on lid heating,leaching, then dripping on food.

Various military's most notably the Russians experimented with body suits that microwaved their occupants to keep them warm in the polar regions.

For some reason the idea didnt catch on, anyone know why not?

This sounds fake on my because generating microwaves is not really something you could 'shrink and distribute' to cover a body.

There is a reason microwaves are boxes.

If I had to guess, the suits were actually infrared heating elements

There are anecdotes of people getting exposed to radar and communications arrays. The results range from instant vaporization to minor burns and a warming sensation

https://www.quora.com/Would-anything-happen-if-you-stand-in-...

The translation isn't splendid, but that seems to describe someone being badly burned as a side effect of passing very high current, rather than by high-energy RF exposure.

There's also an anecdote I think I once heard from an old Lockheed engineer, about the idea of microwave cooking having been sparked by the misfortunes of birds exposed by surprise to WWII aircraft radar being tested. No idea whether that one's true or not, though; I was quite young and very credulous, so wouldn't put it past him to have been pulling my leg for the hell of it.

"ing For More Commercial Kitchen Equipment? Visit celco.ca!

info@celcook.ca (866) 697-0103 The Accidental Invention of the Microwave THE ACCIDENTAL INVENTION OF THE MICROWAVE Home » The Accidental Invention of the Microwave The Accidental Invention of the Microwave The Accidental Invention of the Microwave December 29, 2017 Commercial Microwave Canada, commercial microwave Toronto Commercial Microwave Commercial microwaves in Canada are the mainstay of restaurants, cafes, and cafeterias across the country. But before commercial microwaves in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver restaurants became popular pieces of kitchen equipment, the common microwave was considered a luxury item!

The microwave was invented accidentally in 1945 by a self-taught engineer named Percy Spencer, who was leading a radar project for the defence giant, Raytheon. While testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron, he discovered that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted from the heat. He decided to try another experiment by placing some popcorn kernels near the magnetron, and he watched as the kernels popped into fluffy popcorns.

Next, Spencer placed an egg near the magnetron and the egg began to move from the heat creating pressure inside the egg. The egg exploded and Spencer saw that the yoke had become hot. He realised that the low-density energy from the magnetron could cook food quickly. He created a metal box with an opening through which he fed microwave power. The energy was trapped inside the box, which created a high-density magnetic field. He placed food inside the box, and the heat generated by the energy cooked the food. The first microwave oven was born."

https://celcook.ca/the-accidental-invention-of-the-microwave...

When I was a lad and had to study physics, we got told thats because the microwaves are at the resonant frequency of water molecules (2.4Ghz iirc), and they cause these water molecules to oscillate causing friction which generates heat, and thus the microwave can cook food.

So this is why my question about the Russian body suits using microwaves to heat occupants in the polar regions is not a silly question.

Cell phone sized devices can easily emit watts of microwaves. Such a suit would just be an overpowered WiFi router and some leaky coax, and then a faraday layer to keep it in. I'm guessing the power level would be 30W or less.

Sounds like a fairly bad idea since resistive heating exists though.

Why on earth would you use a microwave emitter for heating rather than some sort of resistive heating wire? The latter is way simpler and is orders of magnitude more compact.

heating the item (in this case a person) directly by beaming waves at it might be more efficient than heating the something that touches the person. Not saying it's an obviously good idea, but there is an argument for it.

Resistive heating elements are simpler, lighter, and cheaper?

Or have you considered the more likely possibility that it’s simply their site policy to place ads wherever they can, which is not necessarily the original author’s intention? Most likely the site just wants to make whatever they can from possible places to insert affiliate links regardless of the article, and that’s it. For all we know it might well even be an automated process to some extent.

Having an affiliate link is unfortunate and very much not smart on their end I would say, but automatically drawing the conclusion that the whole article must have the single purpose of serving as a Trojan horse for this one random link that they also know only a small amount of people will click on is another logical fallacy, and IMO resorting to attributing to malice when things can be explained otherwise.

I opted for Ikea glass containers partly for wanting to avoid plastics (except the lids) and partly to not have to deal with tomato sauces staining the pristine white plastic containers after a single use

Micro/nanoplastics are a secondary consideration overall, primary was just to reduce my usage of plastics a bit, even how infinitesimal it really is. I only realized how much plastic packaging I go through once I moved to an apartment with plastic "recycling", I still separate out most plastics but not everything.

I personally am not really swayed towards ditching whatever plastics I still have, given how ubiquitous it is and I am already happy with my Ikea glassware.

you can find a slew of papers about not using plastic in the microwave, for a couple decades now. I mean you can believe what you want, but if you think microplastics in your food is bad then you should be able to find plenty articles in how they leach into your food, especially when they're hot.

As others mention already, the problem is the plastic, not the microwave, even the article ends with "Go with glass". There have to be many alternatives but I happened upon cookanyday and never looked back. I almost never used the microwave oven before but these make it not only convenient, I actually like the results. Well, most times. Like many products (pressure cooker, air fryer) they want you to just do _everything_ in your new toy, but everything has its sweet spot. I use all at least once every week.

Startling number of people who either don't know how to or reject on principle actually cooking food (as opposed to merely reheating it) in their microwave, too.

And a few classist remarks and at least one usage of "white trash".

I've legitimately never even considered there might be recipes that center around the microwave! Now that I know they exist I will definitely need to try one. Any recommendations?

Not full recipes, but this is pretty informative start to the topic: https://youtu.be/dJrdXRZ3PUE?si=Bpt15EXgF9kdETSo

> cooking food in their microwave

There's only one recipe I semi-regularly use that I'd count as cooking in the microwave. The main reason being that the "classic" way of cooking it takes a whole day, where it only takes 20 minutes in the microwave.

It’s important to keep health articles like this in context.

Sure, try to mimimize risk, but if you’re feeling too anxious remember that human beings are, currently, living longer, healthier lives than they ever have.

Also, given what we know about human physiology, if you want to live longer and healthier, the biggest ROI is not on changing your cookware, but on eating healthy foods and getting regular cardiovascular exercise.

Eat some vegetables and go for a run or a bike ride. We know what works for improving health.

And I am sure a future study might also say : one risk factor for healthy and long life is reading about various health risks and worrying about them all the time :)

Warning: Reading comprehension is known to the State of California to increase the risk of cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm?

Not microwaving plastic is an insanely easy lifestyle adjustment that virtually anyone can do starting immediately without effort. Changing diet or exercising may be much more impactful, but they require significant time and effort - gargantuan amounts compared to just changing from plastic to glass lunch boxes.

An awful lot of pre-packaged meals designed to be heated in the microwave come in (and sometimes, be eaten from) plastic trays. They couldn't really come another way. You can say people shouldn't use those but if that is their lifestyle beacause they don't have time to prepare meals then you lost the "insanely easy" argument.

Just put the frozen stuff into a bowl or plate and microwave it. That's what I used to do and it's insanely easy.

> Not microwaving plastic is an insanely easy lifestyle adjustment that virtually anyone can do starting immediately without effort.

I don't think anyone is arguing that it is futile to try to microwave less or to do so in ceramic or glassware - it is just not qualified if that would have any meaningful personal health impact whatsoever.

> Changing diet or exercising may be much more impactful, but they require significant time and effort - gargantuan amounts compared to just changing from plastic to glass lunch boxes.

I tend to make changes because they will be impactful, even if such changes require additional effort.

Maybe. But the other day I also read a news article about a research that says cancer rates (edit: of people below 60 years old) have risen 80% in the past 30 years, and are expected to rise another 31% by 2030. One suspected cause is the consumption of processed food, which contains additives such as preservatives that are harmful long-term. Another possible reason is microplastic accumulation.

https://www.nu.nl/gezondheid/6279697/aantal-kankergevallen-w...

https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000049

Everyone will get cancer if they live long enough. So as human lifespans increase, rates of cancer increase with it. It's as simple as that.

The article was about cancer rates in people under 50.

Pesticide/herbicide exposure is also plausible, either via direct mechanisms or by disruption of gut microbiota (e.g. glyphosate and the shikimate pathway). It seems likely that these and other factors could interact, too.

I always wonder about whether such comparisons take into account the 50% increase in global population between 1990 and 2019. This BMJ charts do not appear to do so.

It's about cancer rates in people under 50, so...

People are living longer, but anecdotally it seems like almost everyone I know has at least one chronic health issue, and many have multiple. And medical science’s answer to most chronic issues is “We don’t know what causes it or how to help you. Come back if you get a disease I can see in a microscope.”

People have more chronic issues because they are living longer.

To follow that: Genetic changes that have a short term advantage & a long term disadvantage, it's going to be selected for. Evolution stops caring as soon as you've got your child to child bearing age.

Yeah exactly. I probably have some form of rheumatism and fertility issues. Since forever I have avoided my country’s traditional bread based lunch and instead microwaved leftovers in plastic containers. I feel bad about that. I also heated baby formula in plastic bottles. No bpa but it turns out: still bad.

Netherlands: besides one friend of a friend with an autoimmune disease, I'm not aware of chronic health issues in anyone else under 70 years old. Unless you count things like obesity, autism, or often having a headache at the onset of menstruation. Only among my grandparents (>70yo by now), it's indeed common to have something like a wound that doesn't heal or memory issues.

Maybe my value is under the statistical average, but "almost everyone I know"? That sounds very odd as well. Do you know of a genetic-related issue in the family, or do you live in a place where vaccinations are not available or mistrusted or so?

> if you’re feeling too anxious remember that human beings are, currently, living longer, healthier lives than they ever have.

Not in the US, where life expectancy is plunging.

‘Plummeting’

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=us+life+expectancy

Stay away from fentanyl and you'll avoid the #1 cause of life expectancy "plunging" in the US.

> living longer, healthier lives than they ever have.

This is not true in America. Life expectancy has dropped significantly after COVID and several types of cancer are on the rise (notably, pancreatic and liver). Americans are more obese than ever with significant all-cause mortality and lifestyle impacts.

While the impact of COVID may eventually even out, it is just not the case that health and life expectancy is monotonically increasing.

This is a terrible piece of ignore-the-facts advice. The emerging facts about the health impacts from plastics are significant and irreversible. Anxiety is a healthy human response to a threat.

Are they, really? With the obesity epidemic, to mention one of the modern health issues?

I have my doubts that microplastic/nanoplastic exposure is something that the average person in industrialized countries can individually lifestyle-choice their way out of. This is just one vector out of dozens (if not hundreds), most of which haven't been studied so closely. Plastic pollution is a systemic problem, and has been for decades.

You can reduce (or increase!) your exposure to it through individual action though.

and that reduction may have 0 effect :(

it's definitionally non-zero. control what you have control over.

This so much.

It’s a little like democratic elections. A single vote has negligible impact, but all those single votes combined? They have the power to make or break the future of a country. An individual decision not to use plastic is not unlike that.

This implies that my use or not affects other people and not solely myself.

Awaiting numbers as to how much plastics in the water which comes out of my tap is from washed microwaved plastics.

Then change your definition to something useful. I care about impact on human health, so if you reduce (via personal choice) exposure by 1 out of 10, but 5 is enough to seriously impact you and anything above 5 but below 100 has no additional impact, then you've achieved 0

> anything above 5 but below 100 has no additional impact

not sure where you got this part from, but your entire argument depends on it being true, and it isn't

reminds me of the people who said facemasks and vaccines do nothing (meaning literally 0% effect) because they weren't 100% perfect virus force fields

Another one missing simple logic: no, it's irrelevant for my argument whether this is true, it only serves to illustrate the point that "by definition" claim was wrong since it entirely depends on the level of poison and the reduction possible at the individual level

And you claim that it isn't true makes no sense either since this isn't a claim about a fact that can be true or false

Not irrelevant. By definition, non-zero does indeed mean not zero, so that person's claim wasn't wrong, either

> you claim that it isn't true makes no sense either since this isn't a claim about a fact that can be true or false

actually, it makes total sense, because your factual claim was that, for a nonzero number, "you've achieved 0", which is obviously wrong. It's simple logic, friend.

maybe try tying your post back to reality, where the effect isn't actually zero? Fill in the analogy, since it's clear we can reduce our microplastic exposure a non-zero amount (your personal opinion that it's not enough for you is what is irrelevant here)

That wasn't my claim, you keep confusing non0 reduction with 0 effect on human health

I'm sure there's some set of lifestyle choices that would lead to a measurable reduction, but whether that reduction matters practically is a different question.

ok, but have people's individual habits on tobacco consumption reduced the non-smokers exposure to it? These things can make a difference in large enough numbers. It's not irrelevant at scale.

If the scale winds up being that eliminating my microwave usage and throwing out plastic containers from my house entirely reduces my plastic consumption 1 %, then I wasted a whole bunch of time and money, and distracted myself from trying to find ways that _would_ reduce plastic consumption (say, filtration on municipal water - but who knows).

Single source municipal recycling is typically a process of sorting and selling certain kinds of waste to other people, with little processing happening locally. This process is way more wasteful than people would like to think, with changing and opaque rules about what is acceptable and what will wind up just being thrown away. I'd give that as an example of a policy that promotes a certain amount of effort to make people FEEL like they are making a difference, vs actually making a significant difference.

Every journey begins with a first step.

You don't have to do anything and there's no shame in that. Just don't disrespect the people who do.

I think OPs argument is that tackling microplastic exposure through personal choices like microwave use, etc, may be unlikely to make a significant dent in overall microplastic consumption, if it's in all the food, all the water, the soil, the air, the bedsheets, the flooring, etc etc.

Basically all food comes in plastic now a days. There are still people surprised to find out that the aluminum or steel can they get food out of is coated internally.

This article is talking about heating plastic in a microwave which is something a lot of people do but I suspect fewer people have unloaded skids from the back of a tractor trailer in the summer. That stuff that is at room temp on the grocery store shelve has gone through a tone of heat cool cycles before it makes it to you.

sure, plastic coating is not what those consumers wanted but some goals take time to reach. Let's not dismiss people who are making sincere efforts.

For instance, I've been using reusable shopping bags for 25 years and buy most of my food through farmers market, never touching plastic bags or packaging in the whole lifecycle. That's probably at least 10,000 fewer plastic bags. Sure there's some wasteful people that probably use that in a month, I see how people shop.

This isn't a virtue contest - it's a lifestyle commitment just like deciding not to smoke for health reasons. At scale these things have impact.

Also I'm not anti-plastic - I just don't like making a bunch of trash and appreciate higher quality materials.

Bedsheets indeed! After all, isn't polyester essentially a variant of plastic?

What kind of monster has synthetic bedsheets? Cotton or linen only. I can’t even think last time I saw a synthetic sheet.

Personally, I have 60% cotton, 40% polyester. Seems to handle my feet calluses better.

(I get holes in pure cotton sheets too fast)

What size/impact does personal choice have. Plastics are so prevelant is the impact 1% or 50%. If the former your choices don't really matter that much, the latter they might.

This falls into the category of "the tiny bit of extra safety I may gain is not worth the huge amount of inconvenience that it causes."

Even if I were to stop putting stuff in the microwave, that won't account for all the other foods I eat outside the home that may have had microwaving as part of their preparation process. I mean, I'll take a frozen package of ribs out of the freezer and microwave it for a minute so the surface softens enough for me to cut the plastic and peel it off before thawing or brining the meat.

No, I think I'll just take my chances and not have yet one more thing to stress out about.

A quick warm water bath serves a similar purpose while often giving me better results.

It was just an example, but since you mentioned it, that perfectly points out what I meant about convenience.

I can stick a package of meat in the microwave and hit a couple buttons and then go do something else instead of running water for a few seconds until it heats up, possibly having to fill the sink or a bowl and put the meat in. All of which takes more time and effort for basically the same result.

I find it more convenient to use water because I have to watch the thawing meat in the microwave like a hawk; it’s very easy to cook the edges on accident. The center also stays more frozen. To each their own.

Again, I'm not thawing meat!!! I'm making it easier to remove from the packaging.

If you're patient, you could also use cold water :) It seems to me that time management is a bigger part of food preparation than any specific technique for cutting or cooking.

I feel like there is a bit of a cultural divide here. Microwaving is here (central europe) not part of food preperation and if it is used stuff is filled into glass containers instead of plastic packaging?

Even for restaurants?

Yes. If a restaurant microwaves, it would be some horrible place meant for the equivalent of "white trash" or the kind found in tourist traps (which for tourists might be the only kind they ever try, especially if they don't bother much to see where locals eat).

There are all kinds of industrial heated plates, continuously running pots on stoves, or always on ovens, etc restaurants use to keep the day's food heated or slightly reheat it.

Most restaurants use microwaves. They may not use it to prepare the entire dish (that’s reserved for mass-market faux-nice places like Red Lobster), but it’s a standard piece of commercial kitchen equipment. Reheating frozen soups, for example, usually starts with a quick zap to get the process going.

Please don't speak authoritatively about things of which you are ignorant.

Almost every restaurant uses microwaves for some part of food prep. Go work in a kitchen for a bit.

You'd be surprised of what I'm cognizant.

If "almost every restaurant microwaves" in one's area, they should probably move to a better area.

Though I'm not sure what you call a restaurant. Does it include fast food "restaurants" for example? Or some 2x-3x the local price tourist trap in places like Barcelona, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris (say, Montmartre) or the Greek isles?

Indeed, the vast majority of restaurants are filthy, terrible over priced eateries where you are gambling your health. Especially after covid.

How much would you like to bet on sone Michelin starred restaurants having microwaves in use?

Even in the US there is definitely derisiveness towards the type of restaurant that just microwaves frozen food.

It appears that people are taking my remark "as a part of the food preparation process" to mean "they cook with a microwave." Whereas I meant, "take a prepared sauce or ingredient out of the freezer and thaw with the microwave before continuing with the meal."

In much the same way that I take a stick of butter out of the fridge and nuke it for exactly 9 seconds to get it (at least the bottom) to spreadable consistency. In fact, this is 90% of what I use a microwave for.

Food prep? No. Reheating leftovers? Yes. Mainly because glass containers for storing leftover food are more expensive.

You can’t just put the leftovers you want to microwave on a bowl or plate…?

For most Americans, they don't have glass plates/bowls at their work. That's where enough microwaving happens that if you can't "fix" the problem there then there's no point in changing habits at home.

True, I've seen many not even have glasses made of glass. You go to some (not expensive) restaurant, or even a house, and they bring you water in a plastic "glass".

> For most Americans, they don't have glass plates/bowls at their work

Honest question - is there something wrong with microwaving ceramic bowls? Literally every bowl intended for eating (rather than for mixing cooking ingredients) that I have ever owned or encountered has been ceramic.

The answer is almost certainly "it depends".

And it depends on stuff you won't be able to discover.

What do you mean by "ceramic"? Anyway, its the enamel that worries me.

Some ceramic items shouldn't go into the microwave because they have metal embellishments or trim. Some ceramics have lead glaze, which means they're not food safe once cracked or chipped, but I can't say whether microwaving them would make them more dangerous or less food safe.

> > For most Americans, they don't have glass plates/bowls at their work

As a note, most people I've seen microwaving their leftovers at work were microwaving plastic because that's how they packaged the leftovers from home. If there aren't dishes at work, let alone a full kitchen, then leftovers are transported, heated, and eaten from the same container.

> If there aren't dishes at work, let alone a full kitchen, then leftovers are transported, heated, and eaten from the same container.

Fair! I've been lucky enough to always work in places where the kitchen has a decent amount of crockery and cutlery into which leftovers could be transferred for heating, but I can see how this could be an issue. Thanks for pointing that out!

Some ceramic bowls turn into lava in the microwave. Often when I reheat soup in a bowl, the bowl becomes hotter than the soup. The bowl is too hot to touch, yet the soup is only somewhat warm.

Some bowls are more prone to this than others, but it's not obvious and requires experimentation to determine. It's a pain.

Then you have the whole family waiting for their turn to use the microwave. Easier to just heat up all the leftovers in one go.

I've never owned a microwave, instead I air-fry everything. Pretty sure this is the same trick restaurants use, especially fast-food ones. Microwaves make soggy leftovers.

Not all leftovers need to be crispy.

Microwaves work pretty well for saucy Chinese food, for example. (The alternate method is usually steaming, which is even soggier.)

How do you air fry soup, stew, chili, etc.?

You use a pot on a stove. It’s faster than microwaving.

No way is it faster. I can heat a bowl of soup up in 1 minute in the microwave. The pot is barely heated up after 1 minute in the stove, much less the contents.

And it makes another pot to clean.

But the warmth in the food heated on a burner is nicer than the warmth generated by the microwave (more even, cools slowly).

Maybe we slow down and expect our lunch to take 10 minutes to heat and 5 minutes to clean up?

Why?

Maybe it depends on the equipment. My stove can heat soup much faster than my microwave. Not to mention in the microwave you have to constantly stir to make sure it’s not still cold in the middle, because a microwave doesn’t heat evenly.

My guess is that it is a difference in volume. While a microwave is very efficient at exciting water in food, the range top is putting out a _lot_ of heat based on a 220V (in US) electric source or natural gas source.

We switched to glass recently and it's great. They're more durable. They don't stain. They're easier to clean. And, this is subjective, but they just feel more substantial; it's nice in a way that's hard to describe.

These glass containers will likely last forever.

They are more expensive than the cheapest plastics, but it's buy-once, so not a significant long-term factor.

They also get hot after microwaving, which for inpatient people like me is a deal breaker.

E: obviously I can spend extra effort to handle a hot glass container, but I'd rather deal with container without that property. Even with plastic containers there are some that gets suspiciously soft / weak after a few minutes in microwave, and then there's ones that stay sturdy and cool enough to handle. Half the point of microwave is convenience.

Just put it on a plate?

that's what oven mits or pot holders are for...

And trivets, to prevent your kitchen worksurfaces from succumbing to the fate of a myriad ring-shaped marks. This is obviously moot if you are lucky enough to have a granite worktop :)

I just lift them at the sides, close to the top, to avoid being burned. If you're home you could also use oven gloves or paper towel or something.

The containers may last forever but the lids don't.

The lids on my knock-off brand glass food containers have lasted several years now...

We just bought a bunch of new lids for our glass containers. They are very inexpensive.

Really? We tried that about five years ago and they were very expensive (about 70% the price of getting new glassware)

Where did you buy them? Were they name brand?

At IKEA the lids cost 50% of a container + lid; inexpensive compared to the cost of a new plastic container. I bought steel containers 20 years ago and they are still going strong expensive and better value.

Yeah but do you microwave those steel containers?

Where? Are they from the manufacturer?

And the lids are expensive

I don't know about most manufacturers, but IKEA sells the lids separately in part for this reason.

I also have little doubt that IKEA will be around in 10 years compared to some random Amazon brand.

The lids on my pyrex bowls I bought in 1987 are still fine, although I did lose some.

Glass is heavy, doesn't stack efficiently, sticks/grinds together when stacked, and easily chips and breaks. A full glass container is too heavy to lift safely with one hand and too heavy to carry in a backpack. Glass is slippery, and because it's heavy it is also more likely to be dropped. Drop it on a counter and it cracks or chips, leaving bits of glass in your food and sharp edges that will cut you. The purpose of a container is to _transport_ things; anything breakable like glass is a poor material for something that gets moved around a lot. A plastic container will survive long after a glass container has been chipped.

Glass is fragile, dangerous, heavy, slippery, expensive, loud, and space-wasting.

Plastic containers are light, resilient, durable, portable, compact, and efficient.

IKEA has cheap glass containers with plastic covers that can go into the microwave. I think you can also get covers made of bamboo or something that looks like wood.

I usually cover them with a plastic designed for this purpose which doesn't come in contact with food.

Microwaves are extremely useful for food prep, although for specific purposes. A lot of veggies actually do pretty well parcooking (or fully cooking) in the microwave for instance.

I use it all the time for potatoes unless I’m baking them. It shaves a lot off the cooking time with no I’ll effect

I have a set of pyrex bowls I bought in 1987 and still use. The cost difference is negligible when amortized over your lifetime. I store all my left overs in pyrex when possible.

You can move the leftover food from its plastic storage container into a clean glass container or bowl before heating it in the microwave. You just have slightly more things to wash afterwards...

>This falls into the category of "the tiny bit of extra safety I may gain is not worth the huge amount of inconvenience that it causes."

Could also be "the high adverse effects we pay for with extra cancers, higher inflammation, even lower fertility maybe, but were too preoccupied with some received idea of convenience to notice and attribute to such bad habbits".

>Even if I were to stop putting stuff in the microwave, that won't account for all the other foods I eat outside the home that may have had microwaving as part of their preparation process

Whether at home or "outside the home", microwaving is just not seen in a good light in most of Europe I know, and is seldom a thing except as a low-class convenience when you're like a student or something. Though most fellow students I knew would never go for it either, and would start to cook simple but proper food themselves after the 2nd year or so.

When I was a kid, secondhand smoke was everywhere. Now it is rare. If people learn, things can change.

Smoking inside public buildings became illegal where I am. Sometimes learning and habit breaking needs a push.

Most smokers I know still smoke inside their houses.

That's probably an age (culture) thing. The smokers I know smoke -- and even vape -- only outside. The oldest one is 48 but they're married to someone a bit younger.

It's an exquisitely fine gradient if one includes enough dimensions. My dad (now in his late '60s) saw the writing on the wall ca. 1990. He still smoked regularly, but realized that both smoke in the house and being seen smoking were bad for his kids. For a few years he made a nightly ritual of going out into the garage to smoke, then quit altogether.

You (the average person) can't choose your way out or really be safe - but you can at least avoid doing the equivalent of putting your head in the lion’s mouth. At least most of the time. It's not that difficult to use non-plastic kitchenware, or learning to not put plastic in a microwave (or come to think of it: any cooking) at least 99% of the time.

Why so binary? Are you one of those people who, during wildfire smoke, goes outside and smokes cigars because "well the air's already smokey so what's an extra cigar?". Yeah, and now you're breathing in wildfire smoke in addition to that cigar, that doesn't make it better.

I intentionally use stainless steel cookware, a stainless steel thermos (although there's plastic in the cap/spout), and glass containers for meal prep/food storage. I use this stuff on a daily basis, so any bio-accumulation will add up. Just because I can't 100% lifestyle-choice my way out of microplastics contamination doesn't mean I can't 20 or 40% lifestyle-choice my way out, and it's 99% as convenient.

I think I've said it on this site before in similar context, but:

A good friend of mine who used to do hazardous waste disposal said the industry developed a winning mantra: mitigation, not elimination. Or to put it in more familiar terms, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

The article suggests that heating certain plastics to the softening point significantly increases the amount of plastic shed into the food. Despite being only one vector, it could be a very high magnitude. So if you were to make any choice about it, this would be a good candidate, if the claim is true.

You can significantly reduce it easily. Don't heat things in plastic, don't buy hot food or beverages served in plastic or "bamboo / paper," stop using K-cups, etc.

Reduced what percentage? What is the health impact of that percentage? What are other sources and do they have a higher percentage/health impact?

With something that's poison, reducing your intake just a bit is probably the best thing you can do. We know about vapor and outgassing and how temperature affects this. You don't need "sources" just a basic high school level understanding of chemistry to understand these things. I don't need a source to tell me water boils.

There are reams of information out there about how age affects plastics, and how. It's all based on basic chemistry.

What about clothes?

>can individually lifestyle-choice their way out of

>Plastic pollution is a systemic problem, and has been for decades.

Sorry, this gets uncritically repeated so much that it's bordering on propaganda. Like it's just doing free work for oil companies at this point. This kind of stuff is exactly what I'd say as someone working for an oil company's social media team after realizing that individual choice is not something that happens in a vacuum. Corporate propaganda on the personal-carbon-footprint issue backfired - they thought they would be able to demoralize people, but it slowly grew into a movement that continues to grow. It's honestly kind of funny they thought people wouldn't attach their morality to decisions about environmental destruction.

"individual lifestyle choices don't cause systemic change" is a bastardization of the original concept. And it's actually doing the original intent of corporations - to demoralize people about seeking an oilless future.

The original concept was that one should not feel guilty if they can't make an individual lifestyle choice because something is preventing them from doing so. It was never meant to demoralize people from using their own moral compass to decide not to participate in certain behaviors. I don't get why "I want to use less petroleum-derived products and eventually none at all" is exempt from spreading through the social network as a worthwhile idea when literally everything else does.

Again, people aren't individually responsible for the systemic results of their choices, but their individual choices do create signals that result in systemic change. Our choices don't operate in a vacuum, our peers, friends, and family all look at what we do; their peers, friends, and family do the same.

This objection is obviously rote, and is entirely misplaced.

Not microwaving plastic isn't a moral failure, it's a safety hazard due to the plastic falling apart. But if everything you consume is full of microplastics, then worrying about these microplastics is likely a waste of time.

Saying that the environment is so full of microplastics that conscious efforts to avoid them will be a waste of time is the opposite of excusing companies for filling the environment with microplastics. It's saying that the only thing that will be effective is to attack the sources rather than lifestyling your way out of it.

You've confused health for morality, then gone on to give a lecture about it.

Yeah given that we’re finding micro/nanoplastics mainly in people’s lungs and blood it seems more likely I’m getting dosed from aerosols after rainstorms or something.

>This objection is obviously rote, and is entirely misplaced.

No, it's not. The only thing rote here is the repeated argument that individual action doesn't lead to systemic change. It's also not misplaced, it's a direct response to the grandparent saying "we can't lifestyle our way out of exposure to microplastics".

>Not microwaving plastic isn't a moral failure, it's a safety hazard due to the plastic falling apart.

This is a disingenuous reduction of what I've said. The original comment wasn't discussing specifically abstaining from microwaving of plastic, but of lifestyle choices to reduce exposure to microplastics in general.

>But if everything you consume is full of microplastics, then worrying about these microplastics is likely a waste of time.

You seem to think that I believe that avoiding plastic has a direct effect on my exposure to microplastics. I'm confused why you think that since I specifically mentioned social actions whose effects obviously lag behind concrete systemic change. The intent isn't to reduce exposure to microplastics in a physical way, but in a social way. It's about circles of social influence effecting change through ceremony and symbolism. The ceremony of not microwaving plastic (and more specifically, trying to avoid plastic as much as is practicably possible) is something that gets discussed and repeated through many social circles. The symbolism of avoiding specific companies - making them the faces of microplastic contamination - gives people their enemy. Duh, it's boycotting.

>Saying that the environment is so full of microplastics that conscious efforts to avoid them will be a waste of time is the opposite of excusing companies for filling the environment with microplastics.

Absolutely and unequivocally incorrect. This is the exact demoralization I'm talking about: "avoiding microplastics exposure is a waste of time". It excuses the companies in the abstract because demoralized people don't talk about/look for alternatives, it is excuse granted by inaction. Which is better for Microplastics Inc - someone who says "well I'll just be exposed to microplastics anyway so I might as well buy from Microplastics Inc" or "I'm not buying from Microplastics Inc because they are really hurting the environment". There is a reason why there are so many companies that try to depict themselves as green. They still don't fear being depicted as greenwashers but that's going to be their new fear.

>It's saying that the only thing that will be effective is to attack the sources rather than lifestyling your way out of it.

Which is incorrect. Attacking the source requires a social movement. Trying to lifestyle your way out of it is what creates the social movement. I don't genuinely think riding a bike to the coffee shop reduces global carbon emissions in any meaningful way, but the ceremony of doing so creates connection and resilience with other environmentalists. And it works. Just this year, we got massive improvements to both our bike infrastructure and public transit.

>You've confused health for morality, then gone on to give a lecture about it.

What does that even mean? Health is obviously connected to my morality, not confused with it, - I don't want to be hurt by reliance on petroleum, I don't want others to be hurt by reliance on petroleum and I don't want future generations to be hurt by reliance on petroleum. This goes for health and everything else.

I quit smoking about 20 years ago though I’m living in the city next to a major road. I don’t see your point.

I cook at least 50% of my warm meals myself and I learned to prepare meals in advance and to freeze or sterilize them. Not so much to save money but because I prefer good food with known ingredients. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to reduce my intake of microplastics by further phasing out the plastic containers I usually use and use relatively cheap glass containers.

What I am surprised about is that (please confirm if you know otherwise) microplastic contamination from microwaving plastics wasn't investigated decades ago. In the 80's we all knew that some plastics get soft in the microwave, it seemed exceedingly likely to the layman that it would leach out.

Microplastics, were they unobservable in the 80's? Were there no scientists interested in this? I am decidedly anti-conspiracy when I look for explanations on phenomenon, but I am having a bit more trouble avoiding it on this one. Or is this the case that the research existed, but the media finally cared?

Don’t put plastic in the microwave,” has been common advice in my circle for over a decade, maybe three or more? I feel like it either finally stopped getting suppressed, or it finally hit an emergent “critical mass” and broke through (probably the second one).

I mean we're talking about it here, and health hipsters have been talking about it for a long time, but are we actually at the point where enough people know/care that concerted society-wide effort is being made to fix it?

besides companies selling water bottles as "BPA-free", not as far as I can see

yeah, in terms of public opinion, but I am specifically curious about what research was conducted in the 80's or 90's. I tried a few searches on Google Scholar this morning but their UI controls are heavily skewed toward finding new research, not old..plus the long issue of pre electronic publications. I bet there are publications, but probably skewed to particular contexts. e.g. I found a study examining leaching of plastic chemicals into blood plastic pouches used in hospitals. Medical device research probably doesn't tend to "leach" into other research fields

> it seemed exceedingly likely to the layman that it would leach out

It seemed exceedingly likely to scientists too. I've been reading about the dangers of microwaving stuff in plastic containers, or using plastic wrap in the microwave, as long as I can remember. Here's a study from 1990, citing several others that go back to 1988.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Migration-testing-of-p...

I'm pretty sure there were earlier ones as well. What's important here is not to conflate leached chemicals with micro- or nano-particles. Scientists and consumer advocates (and many consumers) have been well aware of the former for a long time, while awareness of the latter is relatively new.

> Microplastics, were they unobservable in the 80's?

Sort of. The term is sometimes attributed to Richard Thompson in 2004.

https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/discover/are-microplastics-a-big-...

Prior to that (or thereabouts) nobody knew to look for whole plastic particles as opposed to individual chemical components. Therefore tools to quantify or analyze them were not well refined, and likewise for methodologies. The specific issue of microplastics in microwaves is even newer than that. It's evolving science, which is practically redundant because that's what science always does. Cases of zero awareness to high awareness overnight are rare. More often it's increasing awareness, and correspondingly increasing sophistication in measurement or analysis, as each study takes years and someone to fund it.

Thank you. You project expertise superbly.

Q: Are biodegradable plastics create more microplastics than more durable plastics?

As a side note,

It should be noted in context that the labels and text "microwave safe" refer to the safety of the product, not the human. The label is added to products that will not melt in the microwave - there is no testing of volatiles emitted.

Really?

"Microwave safe" container labels are not labelled so because it is safe to heat food in them in Microwaves?

Why would anyone just heat empty containers in a microwave? Because that's what the label is saying otherwise isn't it?

Another one to keep an eye out for: "made with 100% organic x" doesn't mean "only contains organic x" but rather "contains organic x (and also maybe other kinds of x)".

"Really?" Yes

"Why'd you heat empty containers?" That's not what the label suggests you do. It's like the 'dishwasher safe' label: you don't put food in your container and then stick the container in the dishwasher for heating and expect to be able to eat the food afterwards. (Would be a fun experiment, though.)

"that's what the label is saying" I never took it that way, also because there is either no research on the type of plastic used and so we don't know that it's toxic yet (because which ethics committee is gonna approve a proposal to «let people eat a bunch of plastic and see what happens to them»), and if there is some amount of evidence that it has some side effects but is not precisely problematic in moderate doses, then why would a manufacturer care if they sell individual drink bottles or some such? It's not like they know that the patient, ahem, customer already got into contact with the chemical a thousand times in the past three months. (See: BPA. I just checked Wikipedia and it says that marketed-as-BPA-free products replaced it with BPF and BPS, and the sentence has references to ~recent studies that say they're equally bad or worse! The more you know about plastics...)

The plausible deniability means they never had to care, so I don't expect a product labeled "microwave safe" to have invented the miracle plastic that doesn't break down into micro/nanoplastics. That would have been world news, not a footnote on an ordinary box.

Is this in the US? I believe that the EU regulates this:

> Overall Migration Limit (OML) of 60mg/kg food, or 10 mg/dm2 of the contact material.

- https://food.ec.europa.eu/safety/chemical-safety/food-contac...

Given that the problem is not the microwave, but the combination of plastic and heat, this may also affect sous vide cooking. I wonder if there’s a specific temperature at which the plastic breaks down and if sous vide can stay beneath that?

What about all those foods that come wrapped in plastic that you put directly into the microwave. For example, you can buy countless vegetables that you are supposed to cook / steam in the package.

Those are just as bad, and often times have an internal package coating that also deteriorates

Microwave popcorn has been confirmed to have high levels of forever plastics.

What about splatter guards which are almost universally made from plastic? Or glass containers with plastic lids? Microwaving food splatters the shit out of the walls and ceiling of the microwave. Is the problem any plastic in the microwave or just the plastic that touches the food?

Yeah, I wondered about that, too... the article specifically mentions the involvement of water (hydrolysis) in the process of micropaticle formation, but the splatter guard is of course exposed to the steam coming from the food, and some of that condenses and drops back on the food, so not using these plastic splatter guards is probably indicated. Covering the container with an inverted plate (making sure to leave some space for steam pressure to exscape) is probably better. I'm going to do that from now.

You can get splatter guards that have a glass "top" and some kind of silicone edging. It seems a lot more durable than the entirely thin white plastic ones that are more common. Look for "GGG-GLOU-GLOU GOOSE" (really) on Amazon.

Only downside is that the glass top can get dangerously hot, but there's a handle.

As someone not weary of using plastic in microwave, for some reason I am very distrustful of silicon used in cookwear, especially equipment that interacts directly touches hot metal like lids, baking sheets etc. I don't even know the science behind it. But I've seen enough semi melted silicon spatula tips to feel like it's not a good combo.

The ones I've seen of this sort are all kinda small. And "gets dangerously hot" makes it a complete nonstarter for me.

With steam being hotter than the product itself, and the steam then condensing and dropping back into the food... yeah, this seems relatively self-evident, so I've been using plates since learning years ago that plastics leak into foods in the first place

I recently picked up some dishes from AnyDay which don't contain any plastic. The lids are made out of glass, silicone, and metal (yes, it is safe to put some metal in specific shapes in the microwave). I haven't used them long enough to recommend them, but they seem fine so far.

It's possible to leave the lid off and put a cloth or paper towel on top to catch splatter.

Or just use a lower power setting, which is either an on/off duty cycle of a couple of seconds, or in the fancier models, actual variable power.

Bonus: you don't fry the shit out some of your food while other spots are cold.

I usually do a brief period on high if something came from the fridge, and then drop to a lower power level. On my microwave "programming" this is actually pretty easy; pushing the power button after entering time allows you to set a second power level and time.

Depends on the product you're heating though. I think it's certain fats that make it sometimes start to pop after literally a handful of seconds, and other times you can go at the highest power (I think that's 800W for me) until the food is done after five minutes and all you'll get is some steam. I've tried to use lower power settings for "normal" products that have splatter but not straight away, but that just doesn't get it all the way hot without starting to get splatter after all. Using a cover, like an inverted plate, is the way to go

I do agree about the part where you mention frying part of the product while the rest is still subzero. Power reduction is useful, for me it just doesn't adequately prevent splatter

The anti microwave comments in this thread are kinda wild considering if you put plastic in other cooking methods it's even worse. Microwave is just the less obvious one.

Especially considering the studies that show how microwave keeps more nutrients in your food (I think the studies I have seen have been particularly for vegetables but I would imagine that is true for others but I don't know).

Would be great if we could find an alternative to plastic covers you have to piece for frozen meals (or plastic steam bags) but I have yet to see an alternative.

But this is a good reason to at least when storing leftovers or sauces to put them in a glass container instead to minimize exposure.

> The anti microwave comments in this thread are kinda wild considering if you put plastic in other cooking methods it's even worse.

What other cooking methods involves using plastic?

I use glass for everything microwave, not because I'm worried about plastic, but mostly because a) I have mostly glass storage containers, b) I feel that it contain the heat better, and c) they keep heat _out_ better.

The latter is probably the most important thing. Easier to handle, and have a shorter cool-down time before putting it into the fridge.

Seems like it is related to this: Study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers (unl.edu) = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36809565

I've always wondered, what about tooth brushes? Don't they release microplastics too?

Toothpaste itself often contains microplastic beads that are intentionally added as scrubbing agents. It's a myth that they were phased out. More than half still contain the stuff!

https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/myth-buster-toothpaste-stil...

Plastics in cooking has probably caused an ecological and human disaster. The teflon and other plastic coatings scrape off into food, release chemicals when heated, and break down when holding acidic foods.

whilst I have no proof of what you have said, I've not taken any chances either all our food prep is done with glass or stainless steel

I'm on a quest to reduce microplastic ingestion but it's really hard. All the easy choices don't help at all.

In Netherlands we have the world's cleanest tap water, but my wife can't stand the tap water here, even getting stomach problems if she drinks it. So instead she drinks a particular brand of bottled water. However bottled water is apparently full of microplastics. Not only leeched from the bottle, vut also from the cap when you open it.

There doesn't seem to be a product on the Dutch market for removing microplastics from water. The best thing I've found is Brita filters. They don't advertise filtering out microplastics but it's plausible that they filter at least some. So now we drinked Brita filtered tap water.

The baby bottles are all plastic. Glass is available but they're hard to find, and our baby only likes one particular brand of bottle, refusing to drink from others.

My son's children's water bottle is plastic. I've never seen children's water bottle not made of plastic. Frankly I'm not sure what to do here. Even if I find a glass version, it's heavy. And if he drops it then it becomes a big mess — especially when he does so at school.

I'm going to replace all the food containers with metal or glass soon.

I also want to replace the sun-blocking curtains but it's really hard to find sun-blocking ones that don't contain nylon. It's madness.

> Netherlands we have the world's cleanest tap water.

Eh? Dutch tap water is fine, but do you have a citation for that?

Also note that "clean tap water" is a bit of a fuzzy non-metric. I live in Amsterdam[1], where the pH of water is around 7.8, but H^2O would be 7.0.

So the water can be trivially he demonstrated not to be "clean", otherwise the pH value wouldn't differ.

But of course what people usually mean is "has bad stuff in it", not how far it is from being chemically pure.

> my wife can't stand the tap water here.

Yeah, I also don't like it. I grew up in Iceland, which has particularly "dirty" water, but it's the "good" sort of "dirty", i.e. minerals and the like.

That and other things contribute to taste, also temperature, Dutch tap water is too warm for my tastes.

I'm not right, nether are you or her. It's just an acquired taste.

> The baby bottles are all plastic. Glass is available but they're hard to find

They're quite easy to find? Search for "glazen zuigfles". But...

> our baby only likes one particular brand of bottle, refusing to drink from others.

...ah, that might be, i.e. perhaps it's just that manufacturer.

Also are you looking for 100% glass? Usually the fitting to close it and the "nipple" itself are plastic/rubber.

> My son's children's water bottle is plastic. I've never seen children's water bottle not made of plastic. Frankly I'm not sure what to do here.

Get him a stainless steel water bottle, my kids have that (I'm not paranoid about plastic, but it's a more durable bottle for school). Blokker, IKEA etc. sell these.

> I'm going to replace all the food containers with metal or glass soon[...]

Respectfully, I think you're going a bit off the rails here, there's probably 10 much easier things you can do to marginally move the needle further on your family's mortality, e.g. applying sunscreen consistently.

But just to feed your paranoia a bit: some things that are "metal" are really just epoxy, e.g. aluminum cans are just epoxy "bags" surrounded by aluminum walls.

Food grade stainless steel is almost always "pure" though.

1. https://www.waternet.nl/service-en-contact/drinkwater/waterh...

That’s why the IKEA 365+ glass containers are the bees knees for freezing and microwaving your food.

I use these too, but as they have microwave safe plastic lids they're perhaps not the best example for those paranoid about plastic exposure: https://www.ikea.com/nl/en/p/ikea-365-food-container-with-li...

> Within three minutes, some containers released as many as 4.22 million microplastics (particles smaller than 5 millimeters)

Is this an error in the article? I always assumed "microplastics" would be much too small to see. 5 millimeters is about half the size of a micro SD card.

<Ctrl+T>!wi microplastic<Enter>

is what it took to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics which says the same thing.

I was as surprised as you are, though

A bit of solutionist brain-storming here:

It seems to me that the main advantage of plastic food storage containers over glass ones — other than price — comes mostly from weight. You don't want to carry your leftovers to work in glass containers; they're heavy!

(And AFAIK no other container material besides plastic is a good substitute for glass in food storage, because 1. they're not washable / interact chemically too much with the food, or 2. they're not visually transparent enough to tell what's in the container. So let's ignore other materials as possible solutions for now.)

I presume that the problem here isn't that microwaves are causing vaporization or spalling of the container material in such a way that microplastic particles coming from the outside of the container can end up in your food. (If that's the case, then plastics are basically entirely screwed for this use-case, and we may as well give up on them entirely.)

But presuming instead that the problem is only with your food interacting with the inner surface of the container, under heat/acid/etc — i.e. some kind of leeching or osmosis of the food against the container surface, causing the plasticizers in the container to "exchange" out...

Then, if that's the case, would it be possible to make a food storage container that's mostly plastic, but then has "just a little bit" of glass, lining the inner surface? A glass barrier-layer, sort of like how plastics themselves are used as a barrier layer on the inside of aluminum cans? Resulting in something that's a lot lighter-weight than a thick glass container, but a lot more "inert" than a plastic container?

Glass is usually brittle, I know; and unlike a glass food-storage container, which is usually thick, plastic food-storage containers are usually more thin and flexible. A plastic substrate would want to bend, and that would, naively, shatter a glass "film" on its surface.

But! We've recently invented bendable ("foldable") glass, haven't we? And in fact we're laminating this "foldable" glass to plastic substrates all the time. It's even transparent!

I think it's workable as a process. You could, in theory, produce glass-lined plastic food storage containers. I only wonder if it could be made cheap enough that, even at massive scale, these containers would come out at a price-point that anyone would pay.

How about using cheap, old-fashioned food-grade silicone, instead of bendable glass?

Silicone absorbs odors from foods and detergents. I guess plastics do too, but not as badly usually.

I accidentally left my silicone spatula at the bottom of the sink too long with some potato skins. It is a potent weapon now.

>You don't want to carry your leftovers to work in glass containers; they're heavy!

I'll never, never understand people. "I don't want to have to carry an additional pound of weight, so I'll trade that for introducing a very small amount of poison into my body." Carrying just a bit more weight doesn't even register as inconvenient.

I mean, I don't think anyone who is aware of the microplastics thing is still using plastic containers. The point is that there is a reason (besides cost) that people were preferring plastic containers when they were unaware of the problems with them: they were lighter. An ideal solution — a true replacement for plastic containers — would be something that retains that advantage, while not putting small amounts of poison into your body.

> Carrying just a bit more weight doesn't even register as inconvenient.

Do you drive/ride transit to work/school? Some people bike, or even walk/jog, with all the things they will need for the day in a bag. Students in school even continue to carry that bag all throughout the day, before, between, and after classes! For a kid who is already carrying a laptop, textbooks and notebooks, etc., having an extra kilo of weight from a glass container can make the difference between just "a heavy backpack", and ending up with bruised shoulders and a kink in their back.

As a former college student who carried a backpack stuffed with textbooks and a laptop sometimes for miles around campus, I didn't notice any difference between when my thermos (carried in backpack side pocket) was empty vs when it was full, and that's 20 floz of liquid which is roughly equivalent in weight to the glass containers I use for food prep.

When people complain about how soft modern society it, it's this crap that they're talking about. "Oh I already carry around 30 lbs of stuff, 31 will break my back!". If you're carrying around so much that 1 lb will literally make the difference between injured and not injured, you need to seriously re-think your system. Possibly save up for a better backpack, possibly learn how to carry weight and do some exercises to strengthen your back, possibly re-arrange your schedule so you aren't carrying as much weight at one time.

And I'm serious about the back strengthening, people (including myself) ruck-march with 20-40 lb packs for exercise, and our backs aren't falling apart. Lifting and carrying weight with good form is great for your back, and strengthens it to the point where you can even use bad form for limited time and avoid injury.

>Possibly save up for a better backpack

TBH this does address a lot of problems, but many people don't like backpacks or whatever packs they use everyday isn't built for ergonmics in mind. A couple extra lbs shifting around can feel pretty annoying. Yes, those are solvable problems, abut I'd rather solve it by using a lighter container.

> Possibly save up for a better backpack, possibly learn how to carry weight and do some exercises to strengthen your back, possibly re-arrange your schedule so you aren't carrying as much weight at one time.

I mean, I brought up high-school kids for a reason. They're carrying a bunch of weight mostly against their will, and they're generally smaller and weaker (incl. less muscle to "pad" parts like shoulders) than adults.

Wait until you hear about what people drink at happy hour.

I have long wanted to get rid of all my plastic containers (On a fairly regular pace I look for glass alternatives).

But for me it always comes down to 2 things:

1. Sizing options, I have yet to find a good 2 partition glass container. They are all either plastic or a glass container with a plastic insert, which defeats the purpose.

2. (And this is the biggest) is storage. Plastic containers just stack up better than glass ones do since they are thinner. In the same space I store plastic containers I may be able to store a third of the number of glass containers.

Edit: Oh also storing them frozen. I have broken too many containers because I made a mistake trying to put glass in my freezer.

I honestly don't know a solution to the second one but not sure if glass lined would fix it.

> 1. Sizing options, I have yet to find a good 2 partition glass container. They are all either plastic or a glass container with a plastic insert, which defeats the purpose.

You're not going to find cheap/mass-produced multi-chambered glassware; that's just not how machine glass-blowing works. At scale, glassware is produced basically by just casting a blob of glass into a solid "uninflated" shape, and then inflating that shape in a blow-mold. No additive steps possible, since the rapid expansion of the glass in the blow-mold cools it too much to enable other glass to stick at that point.

(And before you suggest making a mold in a "w" shape: the arch in the middle would either have too much internal stress — like a Prince Rupert's drop — or do a nice gradual curve in a way that uses far too much material [= extra weight].)

What you might want to try to find is a bento box that's designed to be a collection of independent/modular thinner-walled glass internal compartments, that all slot into a plastic outer racking. This would provide somewhat of the advantages I was describing above, though would certainly be heavier. You could also take the glass containers out of the plastic to microwave them individually. Not sure if I've seen anything like this for sale, but it sounds "obvious", so I'm sure someone's done it.

> Edit: Oh also storing them frozen. I have broken too many containers because I made a mistake trying to put glass in my freezer.

I think buying borosilicate glass containers would solve this. Borosilicate glass is much more resistant to heat shock.

I suspect the broken glass in freezer is due to ice expansion not thermal shock, borosilicate will not save you here.

I routinely store my OXO brand glass containers in the freezer, no problem with solid foods. They're tapered, and claim to be freezer-safe for liquids as well, but I haven't risked it.

I make ceramics using slip casting and I just realized this might be a great idea to try! I'm currently working on a ceramic mason jar that will be compatible with mason jar lids, but I should play around with other food storage containers.

>storage.

My meal prep uses lots of stackable take out containers, in different sizes that nest into each other, with interchangable lids, that take up a fraction of the space. Really optimizes fridge space as well since frequently you can use the best size containers.

Some cycling water bottles already do that kind of thing:

> The Purist WaterGate Bottle features an amorphous silicon dioxide coating that's infused into the inner-wall of the bottle. Essentially, this forms a glass-like finish that provides a totally natural, and completely inert, solution to the problem of your drinks staining the bottle or leaving behind any residual aftertaste. This infusion also shields your fresh water from tasting like plastic on very hot days, making it akin to drinking straight from a sparkling clean glass.

It's not perfect in practice though (I find that the bottles can still absorb flavors of sports drinks, especially if you forget to wash them immediately after a ride). But they definitely don't have the plastic taste and smell of other bottles.

In some Asian countries, microwaves are not common. They use a steamer with either metal or porcelain bowls inside.

Maybe the data can be used to compare between microwave SV non microwave life.

How do you test if your glassware has lead in it?

> Definitely Do Not Put Plastic in the Microwave

...

> The health impacts of eating plastic is still unclear

Huh ok then.

You don’t know what you don’t know

I have high confidence that the health impacts of eating plastic are at worst minimal. Tupperware was invented in 1947.

This could be an argument for anything, so it is a bad argument.

Have not had a microwave in our home for at least 16 years, and don’t ever feel like we are missing anything. There’s literally never any ordinary household situation that requires that fast heating. Just put your leftovers in a pan and stir them occasionally!

I also use my microwave to steam vegetables. It's more energy efficient than in the stove.

It's also great for reheating frozen rice. I make 14 servings in my rice cooker (I'm using a serving size where 1 serving is about 200 calories) and then freeze them in individual freezer bags.

They will keep fine that way for months. Food Network says 6 months but I've never taken more than 2 months to use 14 bags so don't know how accurate that is.

To use I take one or two of the frozen bags, empty them into a large microwave-safe bowl, add a little bit of water, and cover. Microwave for 3 minutes on high in my 1200 watt microwave, or 4 minutes if I used two bags.

Why don't you have a microwave?

Maybe "I don't use a microwave" is becoming the new "I don't watch TV."

I don't really do either on a regular basis...

I never watched TV growing up and by the time I got money to buy my own already developed habits that didn't include TV. I have a big TV for watching films and some occasional YouTube however. I really enjoy films.

I own a microwave but I rarely use it. I cook most of my meals fresh. I might use it for reheating something or melting some butter maybe once a month. Most of my meals are cooked in the oven or pan. I love to cook though so batching cooking up just so you can zap things throughout the week isn't something that appeals to me, etc.

So not really conscious decisions, just two things I don't really do. Am I really that weird?

No, you're not weird. For a while, some people made a point of saying that they didn't watch TV as some kind of strange virtue signaling/position of snobbery and I got the same feeling from the GP statement.

Well, young people don't really watch that much TV these days. Why would they? I mean, you have to choose a channel and then you're watching the same thing for ages, like 25 minutes or something. Boring! And you have to sit there with your family for that whole time. I guess it's ok if you're really old and can't move very much, though that seems like a kind of torture where you can't move so you have to keep watching the same thing over and over.

Because I value cooking as it’s own art, not something that needs to be disrupted and optimized.

I admit that it’s mostly convenience. But there are some things you can only do with a microwave.

Popcorn during a short commercial break (stovetop popcorn is way way more involved)

Melted butter (using a saucepan is NOT more convenient than just melting it directly in a measuring glass)

Mug brownies

Commercial break? I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those!

For popcorn there’s a third option: get an air popper! They’re fast and convenient, make great popcorn, and allow you to precisely control how much fat you add (since they don’t use fat to pop)!

But then I have a kitchen gadget ONLY for making popcorn. The microwave is multifunctuonal.

I don’t see many actual commercials anymore but I do value being able to get up during a movie with other people and make popcorn without asking them to pause or missing much context.

Maybe I’m weird in this way but pausing movies breaks my immersion, even if I miss a bit of context while I’m out of the room.

The key is to find the perfect moment to pause. Usually this is at the end of an act, during the fade-out.

Are you a fan of Alton Brown? He seems to be at the vanguard in the war against “unitaskers”. I would imagine he’d make his popcorn in a pot with oil, though!

Stovetop popcorn is superior in all ways end of story.

No, it takes longer, it’s messier, it’s less consistent.

You can make the argument that the end product is better, but that it’s superior in “all ways” doesn’t pass the sniff test even a little.

You don't want faster solutions? Even when you really need to value your time?

No OP but personally I don't like to nuke things. Not because I'm scared of microplastics or radio waves or any nonsense but precisely because I value my time - the time I spend cooking and in the kitchen is some of the best time of the day.

I much prefer to spend 5-10 minutes bringing leftovers back to life in the pan, maybe adding some extra water or balancing the seasoning as I do so than chucking it in the microwave and hoping for the best.

Essentially instead of being time I minimize it's time I value more than what I would be doing otherwise (usually coding).

Mind you I work from home and have the luxury of plenty of time to prepare the majority of my meals and am definitely a "foodie" so it's unlikely this is for everyone, just my perspective.

Thanks for taking the time to explain my position in more detail, this resonates.

A good modern microwave is a fairly magical device, most people don't know how to use it right though. It's definitely useful the more you read recipes that specifically use it. It's like not a top 10 device but its like #11.

Check out peeled steamed asparagus in the microwave, quick, beautiful and delicious.

I had never trusted the automatic “reheat” options that a lot of microwaves have had for years, until just recently I tried it out for reheating some chicken and pasta - and it really did a decent job. They’ve obviously iterated. (I don’t even know the model, but it’s a larger one probably two years old that I bought at goodwill for $30)

A lot depends on whether the microwave oven has a humidity sensor, and how that data is used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0

I know it's a bit of a meme but I was always curious to try out some of the recipes in the "Microwave cooking for one" recipe book.

https://www.microwavecookingforone.com/

Soup? Thick cut of meat already seared? Melting cheese?

Stovetop. Slice meat and re-sear in cast iron pan and serve on toasted bread. Oh I don’t have a toaster either!

Warming up with sous vide can restore most meats to be nearly indistinguishable from fresh from the oven/grill, however I've gotten worried lately about the heated plastic bags.

It takes 1 minute to heat up many meals and there is no cleanup or gas in the air.

Don’t microwaves have a plastic ring underneath the turntable?

What an odd time to be alive. We've eliminated most of the obvious and immediate causes of death, and are left with health warnings for actions that are increasingly difficult to correlate with harms.

"science oven"

Please use the correct terminology.

> The health impacts of eating plastic is still unclear

Wake me up when there’s a reason to care.

Why should society be restructured on a hunch?

Might be impossible to wake you up at that point

"Unfortunately we cannot do anything, maybe we could have if we caught it before stage 4"

fear monger

reactive chemicals not normally found in nature probably aren't a good thing to introduce to your body

>Gastrointestinal (GI) cancers are the fastest-rising early-onset cancers, increasing by almost 15% from 2010 to 2019. This increase is a global phenomenon.

Or, maybe, there's something to this.

Utterly terrible argument. You could just as easily claim social media or touchscreens or episodes of Modern Family or literally anything else has lead to this increase.

"Wake me up when it's stage 5."

From cradle to grave, plastic everywhere: :-\

  - Food supply and packaging: eat un-packaged, unprocessed food, leftovers in ceramic, glass, and metal
  - Clothing: use cotton, hemp, wool
  - Medical (PPE, masks, Covid/Flu vaccine syringe, IV administration set): stay healthy

I remember the old days of tin canned soup and TV dinners in metal foil trays.

Last time I was putting plastic in a microwave was some 5-7 years ago. I went to a registered nutrition specialist with obesity and obesity-based issues. The guy had programs either providing you with diet-appropriate daily recipes, or a daily delivery of 5 dishes in plastic containers. I was too lazy at the time for the former option. But the important part is: it was all about eating 5 times a day.

The label on these boxes stated that you only have to break the (plastic) seal before putting the (plastic) box in a microwave. I was doing it for a year and a half, telling myself that it's beneficial and I'm doing it to be healthy. I was _forcing_ myself to eat 5 times a day, never being hungry and never enjoying this food. And I was possibly contaminating it by heating food surrounded by plastic in the microwave.

The guy was a moron, pushing his "5 dishes a day is ideal for everyone" mindset on every customer, with no regard to personal preference. I was eating 2-3 times a day before this program but I had no understanding of nutrition and was eating crap with higher amount of calories than I was burning. Eating 5 times a day during the program have not improved my health. And the food was awful. I sacrificed the pleasure of eating for some 18 months with no beneficial results.

Theory:

To lose weight, one needs to stay in a caloric deficit based on burning more calories than ingesting. To do it smart, one also has to understand macro-nutrients and not stuff themselves with more fat+carbs than one burns. The basics are:

- proteins (amino-acids chains) are building blocks required to build/restore cells

- carbs and fat are fuel that one burns for energy

- carbs are burned faster than fat and if you ingest more carbs and fat than you'll burn - you'll store fat

It's that simple: burn more calories than the intake and avoid more fat+carbs than you can burn to actually burn and not store additional fat.

Practice:

For a few years now, I'm on a 20:4 intermittent fasting schedule, which translates to calories ingestion only during a single 4-hours-long window during the day. I went back to only eating in the late afternoon. I go to the gym in the morning and stay in caloric deficit 'till the evening.

I'm also on keto. The "no gainz diet" works for me personally, but is not a "golden recipe" for everyone trying to lose weight. Proper knowledge of nutrition basics is the key.

And... I had to break keto once in last year. My weight went down to 56kg and body fat to 8%. Great sixpack but my face resembled meth addicts'. I've found no way to gain weight without bumping LDL cholesterol to unhealthy levels and decided to go with "very-low-carb" for 2 weeks. It worked and I'm back on keto. Happy to repeat the "very-low-carb" thing every year or half but overall - keto works well for me and keeping caloric deficit for the better part of the day reduces my hyperactivity. It's a personal preference.

I make all my food from basic ingredients, avoid plastics, have no microwave and I avoid frying, apart from making omelettes or scrambled eggs. And it's rather rare despite my daily 3-6 eggs intake.

I'm happy with the choices I made. Organic food (from veggies to organic-fed meat), daily gym and 10+km walk, no plastics involved apart from meat containers just for transport and overall understanding of what I'm doing to my body.

And it's all about personal preference: I know people on keto for whom eating early in the day works best, while I avoid any calories in the morning, apart from the fat in vitamin D3 softgel capsule.

Anyone have a working (non paywalled) link to the source behind the "findings" link?

It is strange to see people with such mistrust of a microwave because it is "unnatural" and therefore unhealthy.

The process of cooking anything using something "natural" like a fire creates a lot more carcinogens than a microwave.

You wouldn't put plastic in a pan or oven to cook your food in, so if you want to reduce your exposure to plastic just use another container, it would be useful to know what the objective harm of this practice is compared to say using gas stove.

> You wouldn't put plastic in a pan or oven to cook your food in

Someone should probably tell Costco. They offer a variety of ready-made frozen dinners that instruct you specifically to place the plastic container into the oven at 300ºF.

Ya frozen tv dinners are a big culprit here. Fortunately, atleast Trader Joe’s in my area has just switched to paper containers. Who’s got the over/under whether that paper is lined with plastic…

It is. Unless the liquid has seeped through it or something

I wonder about glue present in the paper/cardboard.

Generally paper containers are covered in PFAS.

The article has a whole section on why microwaving plastic creates a specific risk.

Yes, but the risk is not quantified, one also exposes themselves to carcinogens when eating anything that has been smoked and I'm sure if you put kidney cells in a bath of carcinogens it would also not do so great.

Tthe fact that there is no clear data on the danger of microwaving plastic containers despite millions of people doing it all the time means suggests the danger is low/negligible.

One main reason I started eating mostly vegetarian at home is the preparation stage. With all vegetables, wood cutting boards are simple and easy. But they're porous and I don't want meat bacteria getting absorbed in the wood. The typical response is "use a plastic cutting board", but have you ever looked at a plastic cutting board after a few uses? 1000s of nice crevices for bacteria and loose plastic.

Nah I'm good, I'll just cook vegetables and have meat as a special treat. The only plastic in my kitchen is some measuring cups, and soft ended spatulas/ladles and even those should be replaced.

Sure I don't know what exactly plastic does to my system, but should that be a reason to not avoid putting plastic in my system? I'm sure I'm already accumulating a ton but I can at least reduce it in areas that I control.

I've cut an awful lot of meat on wood cutting boards. It's fine. I always cut the meat last, then wash it soon. If it's chicken, I wash immediately after cutting, but that's kind of my practice regardless of cutting board material because I don't want chicken juice sitting around.

You can put plastic cutting boards in the dishwasher, though, and get them quite hot to sanitize. Generally, that will destroy a wood cutting board. I suppose you could maybe use UV light to sanitize a wood cutting board.

As discussed in the article, heating can increase shedding, creating a porous surface. It's OK that it's porous if it's cleaned in the dishwasher after every use, but, and I may be wrong, I wouldn't be confident all the shedding is washed away in the dishwasher.

>I suppose you could maybe use UV light to sanitize a wood cutting board

If your wood cutting board is made right, it helps with sanitization. The grain is supposed to be "up and down", so you cut "into" the grain. This pushes the microbes "into" the cutting board, where they are starved over oxygen and die - or the wood pushes the microbes back "out", where you can clean them off the surface.

By the way, many wood "cutting boards" are actually "charcuterie" boards - they are thin, and the grain doesn't run "up and down". The wood cutting boards I'm describing are thick, like 1 inch thick.

Only use wood. If it dries out throughly, I don’t think much can survive on it. Put it in the sun if you’re worried.

I always oil my boards.

Either way I’ve cut meat on wooden boards for 20 years and never been sick.

I think a lot of home cooks take advice meant for commercial kitchen standards out of context and apply them their home. where they make a few meals a day for probably pretty healthy people.

like there are really people out there that won't eat cookie dough :(

i remember digging into this a bit and came away from it finding that wooden cutting boards are fine for meat. supposedly they have some "antimicrobial" property, forgot what that was though or if its actually legit.

Actually, I do use a separate wooden board for meat and another for fruit, veg cheese etc...

Sorry for my ignorance, but what harmful bacteria predominant to meat will live for that long on a surface? After using my wooden cutting boards for meat, I throughly scrub them and let them dry for at least 48 hours before even putting them away. Salmonella and campylobacter I think are well destroyed by then, and I probably won't even use the board more than once every 5-7 days, always cooking everything cut on it.

None, wooden cutting boards don’t house bacteria for long. Plastic cutting boards also ruins knives.

Humans are really robust against meat bacteria. Even rotten meat is not as problematic as most would think. The majority of human evolution was spend without refrigerators, so we had ample time to adapt for the consequences.

That doesn't mean it was a nice way to live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyds_Bank_coprolite

> Analysis of the stool has indicated that its producer subsisted largely on meat and bread whilst the presence of several hundred parasitic eggs suggests they were riddled with intestinal worms.

Eating spoiled meat doesn't give you worms, eating raw meat would. One of our adaptions was cooking, which this individual probably didn't do all the time.

> In 2003, the coprolite broke into three pieces after being dropped

Shit!

Fascinating article, thanks for sharing it!

I simply rinse my wooden boards with boiling water after cutting meat on them (and then wash them of course).

What about the porousness of the vegetables? It is well understood that there is a high likelihood that vegetables are contaminated with "meat bacteria" before reaching your home. In fact, a significant number of "meat bacteria" illnesses are attributed to the consumption of contaminated vegetables.

Which, of course, is why you wash your vegetables before use. If that washing is good enough for your vegetables, why wouldn't it be good enough for a cutting board?

There have been some studies (plural) that indicate wood cutting boards are safer than plastic cutting boards in terms of bacteria. That said, I have a dedicated cutting board for meat.

https://commonsensehome.com/wooden-cutting-boards/

Being a vegetarian is totally fine, but I find your reasoning pretty flimsy - it seems like you worked backwards to come up with it. Millions & millions of people cut meat on wood cutting boards every single day and it's completely fine.

This is backwards. Plastic gets those nicks and crevices as you point out. Good wood cutting boards don't absorb much, aren't good harbors bacteria anyway, and the nicks self heal.

I use a glass plate. Cleans easily and well.

Are there any no plastic microwave containers that doesn't get hot?

You’ll live. Don’t worry.

Look for “microwave safe” label from major providers, e.g. Glad.

glad I never trusted the microwave for food. Something iffy with that cooking method

Is it? The problem is not the microwaves but the container you cook in. Put it on a plate and you are fine.

or in a cristal tupperware, isn't it?

> Something iffy with that cooking method

It’s anything but iffy; the science behind microwaves is well understood. What part exactly don’t you trust? The laws of physics that govern this particular universe we happen to exist in?

This may sound dumb, but I never trusted microwaves. It just feels so unnatural. I even have basic understanding on how they work (water molecules in food start to vibrate producing heat), but it just doesn't taste good and feels off. No way it is healthy.

Can you give us a quick rundown of what heat is, in your understanding?

I think the takeaway here is cooking in plastic in the microwave, not the microwave technology itself.

> No way it is healthy.

That’s a bold claim. How did you come to this conclusion? Do you have any scientific literature you can point us to that proves microwaved food is unhealthy?

it's not healthy, but only in the sense that it lowers the barrier to eating more food. other than that, heat is heat

If you go by that standard, barbecuing over a fire is pretty unnatural too. Burning chemicals, depositing random hydrocarbon soot onto your food, having poor control over the cooking temperature... And we know it's unhealthy.

The culprit here is plastic. There has never been a reasonable suspicion that microwaves themselves are in any way detrimental.

> water molecules in food start to vibrate producing heat

That isn't really how microwaves work. Or, perhaps, that's how all radiation heat things work. It's any molecule that will absorb radiation of that frequency. So your grill works the same way, just at a different frequency. At microwave level, it's water, fats, all sorts of things. The difference is really the stuff that doesn't absorb at those frequencies.

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