Hacker News Reader

Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

Actual research into this area is needed for us, but I am always left wondering, why are we not doing research into what packaging is better for us?

Are glass bottles OK, or does the coloring leech out? I am guessing clay pots were fine for thousands of years, should I be using them? What about brown paper wrap? I know the butcher paper has a coating on it... Every time I read something like this two thoughts come into my mind:

  - I will never get "mega corp" to stop using them. 
  - I do not know what the alternatives are.

View on HN

Depending on the era, clay pots often had led glazing, which could leach out into acidic foods/beverages.

Generally glass is going to be fine, as long as it’s not painted/coated on the surface that touches the food or your lips. That said, the cap is almost certainly plastic/plastic coated.

Plastics are all suspect IMO, particularly in hot liquid applications (looking at you, Pho delivery).

Aluminum seems like it would be fine, but the cans all use internal rust inhibiting coatings (which vary from beverage to beverage) that are also suspect.

Parchment paper is fine, butcher paper is coated, as you point out.

Oh, and your drinking water is probably full of microplastics.

Personally, I use glass storage for leftovers, reverse osmosis filter for drinking water, only buy liquids packaged in glass, and try to buy whole ingredients/cook my own food. But I still sometimes enjoy a can of beer or a take out meal. I figure if there is a hazard, it’s dose dependent, and I just try to be a little thoughtful about where I’m picking up exposure.

> Aluminum seems like it would be fine

There are risks with aluminium causing neurological problems, especially the soft unanodised stuff. I think aluminium cooking pans are banned in some countries.

Ah damn, there goes another one – thanks for flagging. We oven-cook fish packets and recently switched from using foil to unbleached parchment, but that was more about sustainability. Guess there's another good reason to avoid the foil.

> and try to buy whole ingredients/cook my own food.

How do you think the ingredients are delivered to the store?

Glass is the gold standard for a non-reactive chemical. Use glass jars instead of plastic whenever possible.

You are right it is much better, but it's not automatically helpful. Bottled beers have been shown to still have phthalates:

https://www.mdpi.com/2311-5637/9/2/125#:~:text=Especially%20....

>The lowest minimal total phthalates were found in glass bottles (7.07 µg/L), whereas the highest were determined to be in cans, at 101.60 µg/L.

Even though they are significantly better than plastic and aluminum (lined with plastic) containers, they still contain phthalates.

Also worth noting that the FDA has explicitly denied petitions to ban them in food:

https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-and-gras-ingredients....

>On May 19, 2022, the FDA denied this petition.

>the petition also did not demonstrate the proposed class of phthalates is no longer safe for the approved food additive uses.

This despite a mountain of evidence, going back 10+ years, showing that phthalates are endocrine disrupting chemicals.

The phtalates do not come from the glass, they come from the (lined) caps or previous processing steps where plastics were used.

Correct! Sorry I did not mean to imply that the glass itself was the problem, just that choosing glass doesn’t mean that the product is phthalate-free. So many foods contain these chemicals because of some contamination during processing.

Glass isn't good enough for extreme non-reactivity, e.g. for containing ultrapure water used in semiconductor fabs. The real gold standard for non-reactive chemicals is PTFE, which is a PFAS. This shows that lumping all PFAS together as "forever chemicals" makes no sense. So long as you never overheat it (easily confirmed with an IR thermometer), PTFE is one of the safest food-contact materials you can get.

Borosilicate glass or soda-lime glass are not good for storing ultrapure water because sodium ions will be leeched from the glass.

This is not something that would matter in any food-contact application.

While PTFE neither is modified by food nor any part of it is leeched into the food, it can retain minute amounts of food in its pores, which may be retained despite further attempts to clean it, which does not happen with glass.

When a PTFE container is used to store different kinds of food, it can transfer the scent of one of them to the other.

The PTFE recipients used for chemical experiments may be cleaned by aggressive methods, e.g. with strong acids and/or strong oxidants, which would destroy any organic substances. Such cleaning methods cannot be applied in a common household.

Therefore borosilicate glass or soda-lime glass are better food-contact materials than PTFE, even if they can react with various chemicals that would have no effect on PTFE, but none of those chemicals are encountered in food.

The association of PTFE with PFAS makes perfect sense. Part of the manufacturing process of Teflon (brand name PTFE) involves (involved?) GenX, which is reactive and was being dumped our drinking water supply.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene The commonly known brand name of PTFE-based composition is Teflon by Chemours, a spin-off from DuPont, which originally discovered the compound in 1938.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX GenX chemicals are used as replacements for PFOA for manufacturing fluoropolymers such as Teflon

In June of 2017, The Wilmington Star-News broke the story that GenX was found in the Cape Fear River – the drinking water supply for 500,000 people.

It's not just "association"; PTFE literally is a PFAS. My point is there's a major different between PFAS polymers and PFAS small molecules.

From https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/source/hsdb/833 :

"Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8, is another man-made chemical. It is used in the process of making Teflon and similar chemicals (known as fluorotelomers), although it is burned off during the process and is not present in significant amounts in the final products." [GenX is very similar.]

And there's no technical reason why manufacturing PFAS polymers necessarily has to result in PFAS small molecule pollution. The waste could be captured and treated with processes such as supercritical water oxidation. This would of course cost more, but seeing as there's no good substitute for PFAS polymers, I'd happily pay more for them. Pollution, like all externalities, is a market failure, and it's the government's job to fix market failures with regulation.

Gambling with people’s health for a third time to “correct a market failure” is an incredibly grim proposition. Oh it causes cancer? We’ll try again with a new chemical! New chemical in the water supply? Oopsie, we’ll capture it with this next attempt!

I'm in favor of banning release of small molecule PFAS altogether. I don't see how that's "gambling".

Chemical reactivity isn't the only thing at play here, in fact I'd say it's more burying the lead (kekek) than addressing the issue at hand. Sure glass isn't the most inert material, but another piece of the puzzle that is often neglected is mechanical abrasion. Once that surface has been compromised, the microplastics come right out.

Glass has the benefit of very high chemical inertness while also being extremely resistant to mechanical abrasion. Some types of glass are clearly not good enough (eg most 'crystal'/lead glasses), but borosilicate and fused silica are certainly well proven materials.

Another process that is relevant, leaching, while considered a 'chemical process' does not actually involve any kind of 'reactivity'. It's governed by solubility and statistical mechanics.

The part where you don't want to overheat it is the issue when it comes to food. We humans really like to heat our food.

Depends what you're cooking. I'd never sear meat on non-stick, but there are many other dishes that don't need high temperatures.

The main issue I see is that it's impossible to know how hot a pan surface is, and food cooks very differently at the same temperature depending on things like moisture content. So how on earth do you know whether it's at high temperature?

>it's impossible to know how hot a pan surface

Just point an IR thermometer at it. They're cheap and useful for cooking even if you're not using non-stick.

Plenty of people place plastic containers into microwaves.

That's also risky because of the potential for hot spots. I microwave things regularly, but in glazed ceramic.

How about borosilicate glass?

While PTFE (Teflon) is resistant to many chemicals that would damage borosilicate glass, borosilicate glass is perfectly safe in contact with food.

Borosilicate glass is much more resistant to acids (except hydrogen fluoride) than to alkalis, but most foods are acidic or neutral, none are alkaline.

Of the materials commonly encountered, the safest for food contact are borosilicate glass, normal glass, commercially-pure titanium and stainless steel.

Still more reactive than PTFE.

While PTFE is much more inert than common glass and even than borosilicate glass, it is not a good material for food storage.

The reason is that PTFE, like any plastic, is porous, so it can never be perfectly cleaned, but it will retain embedded in it some residues of the food previously stored in it. This can lead just to some undesirable smell, but in appropriate temperature and humidity conditions it can also lead to the growth of bacteria.

For food storage and handling, the best food-contact materials remain glasses or metals, which can be cleaned perfectly.

One of the most insightful comments being downvoted?

You'll never get mega corp to stop using them because you will never get regular people to stop wanting them.

Convenience is king, and humans simply aren't really programmed care about long term consequences.

Not fair to consumers. Mega Corp created pretty metal cups and we moved off of plastics ones like nalgene. Vacuum sealed metal containers hold ice much better than glass or plastic.

Jokes on us, Mega Corp sprayed plastic liners and/or PFAS onto the metal for longevity. Same with milk cartons. Most of us didn’t know this until years later.

Glass is not an option for people with young children. I don’t want to pick up glass out of their car seat again.

It is not just convenience. It is also cost. How many customers will be willing to pay a $ or more just for the packaging? Every alternative to plastic is much more expensive. For instance, take glass. Glass bottles break very easily during transport and they are also more expensive to purchase. If you are thinking of recycling them, that too adds cost in the process - from pickup, cleaning, drying etc.

The holy grail for packaging would be a transparent, flexible, glass-like substance that is also extremely inert and which doesn't absorb the contents, doesn't spoil, doesn't allow air in or out, retains shape for a long time.... and yet can be decomposed!! As you can see this is a tall order.

And is light like plastic and not heavy like glass

> Convenience is king

Price is king. Everyone knows glass containers are better and consumers prefer them. However, shipping glass containers has a considerably higher cost than plastic from both a weight perspective as well as a fragility/loss perspective. That doesn't even factor in the cost of the glass containers themselves.

If someone invented a glass that was as cheap and light as plastic food suppliers would switch to it in a heartbeat.

What the world needs is glass foam that's strong enough that it won't break while shipping and smooth on both the outside and inside. Think: Glass foam with a Gorilla glass-like surface on both the outside and inside.

Were clay pots fine? How would we know it wasn’t helping with the 50% child mortality rate?

I object to the idea that the old-times ways were better when we know even in the short history people were prescribe cigarettes and brushed their teeth with radioactive toothpaste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com