FDA, Industry Actions End Sales of PFAS Used in Food Packaging
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That contact layer would be one of a fairly small list of very well understood materials.
And we'd run multi-year animal studies with tens of thousands of animals to demonstrate safety of those materials.
(Unlike current studies which might just be 10 mice for 3 weeks)
Please don't spray anything more on my food.
The sheer cost and time it would take to actually show with a high level of certainty that a chemical liner layer is safe won't work for the commercial food industry. It's much easier to claim some new process or packaging is totally safe, send that to regulators who largely outsource safety testing to the industry itself, and move on selling what is potentially toxic.
All magic comes with a price, and the inside of Mylar packaging is absolutely magic. That is, it seems like whenever we try to science our way out of some food mistake, we end up making it worse.
Don't get me wrong, science has kept a lot of people from starving (although heavy nitrogen fertilizer use and monocultures are a challenge for the environment), but after a certain point, we started losing gains in health because we started optimizing for profit.
Now, we put pictures of nature on ultraprocessed food and convince people it's good for them, when all they really need is to eat an apple, which, unfortunately, has no marketing department.
Humans are smart, but there is probably no magic bullet. The safest food packaging is the skin on an orange.
I think you'll find that apples do have a marketing department: https://waapple.org/.
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-epa-lowered-screening-soil-hou...
Can you imagine how much water would have to be brought in to feed the people of Denver, CO, and the economic and environmental impacts of that?
I'm not saying that the only change I'd like to see is people raising their own food and shopping locally. Our current system in the US is entirely based on the average person wanting to outsource responsibilty, not just with food but also with things like education, safety, and conflict mitigation to name a few.
If I could magically change the world I'd want to see a world where people live much more locally, with smaller tight not communities. Among other things, "the economy" wouldn't even be a concept to worry about. That's not to say money wouldn't exist, but there wouldn't be one overarching government tracking GDP data as though we're still in the midst of the world wars.
More importantly, I'd want people to want this world.
That said, you have no way of really knowing how poverty or starvation would change. There isn't even enough context here to attempt to estimate such a thing and doing so isn't useful.
I think that's what's currently happening and the problem is that things that work for that tend to be things like PFAS, which is why they have been used for that purpose.
And I'm not sure animal studies are necessarily great at determining the risk from long-term exposure to small amounts of things like plastics either.
That makes them very expensive though. But that's probably worth it to avoid population scale health impacts.
Two that I know that’d fit the bill well are Zein (corn) and Chitosan (Crustaceans, Mushrooms, although now we can make it in bioreactors). There are extensive studies on them, and there are a bunch of folks who have invested time in building food packaging out of them (although, maybe not in the way you’re thinking).
As far as I can tell, these materials can be made suitable with enough engineering to meet the task at hand. They are more expensive than current solutions, and perhaps the engineering would need to be studied more closely for safety, but what you’re suggesting doesn’t seem entirely crazy.
It's a voluntary compliance on the part of manufacturers, spurred by FDA efforts.
...a voluntary commitment by manufacturers to not sell food contact substances containing certain PFAS intended for use as grease-proofing agents in the U.S.
It makes me wonder how they were getting away with using materials that weren't approved as food-grade in the first place. And also whether there's been significant development of substitute materials over the last few years and how much of a factor that was, outside of any implied FDA threats.
The Montreal Protocol worked so well because it told companies/countries to phase out what was already an old refrigerant and instead use a more modern and efficient r134a.
If someone invents something functionally identical to PFAS at a lower cost and without all the toxicity, you'll have a global protocal signed in a month with everyone eager greenwash their PR with how they stopped using PFAS. And consumers will be happy because they don't have to sacrifice an inch of quality of life.
https://www.fda.gov/food/cfsan-constituent-updates/fda-respo...
Reminiscent of talking with dairy farmers, who all seemed extremely worried of hormones and antibiotics in cow milk and really wanted to fix it. Both political leanings were not keen on what might coming out from cows and wanted the best for consumers
Now we need to look at the plastic layer thats in canned foods and sodas.
A small win against the otherwise massive mess we have with xenoestrogenic chemicals turning the friggin frogs gay. /S
I looked up the manufacturer of these "compostable" containers and discovered they keep oils out of the cardboard with a PFA coating. PFA-laden compost, just what any gardener would want. /s