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Comment by darknavi | Hacker News Reader

Mostly unrelated, but glass in the kitchen:

I was in a restaurant the other day and a friend pointed out a small chip on a pint glass. They mentioned that many people take their glass cups and scoop ice out of an ice drawer which can result in small glass shards to be ejected into the ice drawer (and thus ice) which would be very, very bad to ingest.

It might be obvious, but probably best to avoid ice scooping with glass cups!

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My spouse worked as a server in a restaurant, was told not to do this and learned the hard way and it's common sense: someone has to empty the machine, clean it completely out, and wait for it to fill back up again which takes hours.

Do people still use ice drawers anymore? I only see dispensers everywhere.

As someone who lived in Europe for a while, I am completely mystified about this obsession with ice in every drink.

When I was young and didn't have disposable income and consequently cheap, I skipped the ice because it simply reduced your available drink quantity and it watered down your soda.

A number of French-door style fridges have ice drawers since the freezer is positioned below knee level.

If you can swallow glass shards without feeling any pain, they will pass through the intestinal track just fine.

Source: ER doctor when I checked myself in after discovering I accidentally ate glass. He was right. Nothing happened. I was fine.

I’d be interested to know how you ate glass without realizing it until it was too late.

I poured soup into a glass bowl that contained many shards from a chipped rim that I failed to notice. I had consumed nearly the entire bowl when I bit into the largest shard. I strained the remaining soup for glass, found more shards, but many were unaccounted for. Only possibility left was that I had slurped them down

Big difference between glass and plastics. Glass is chemical inert while plastics degrades and leaks into everything. See the flavor of a plastic bottle that has been in your car for a while. Some plastics may even resemble stuff that is in your body. It's all processed dinosaur juice after all (actually trees, but whatever).

True but glass is very much "outside the body only". Don't want shards in your gut.

> Glass is chemical inert

Well, except for leaded glass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_glass

"Several studies have demonstrated that serving food or drink in glassware containing lead oxide can cause lead to leach into the contents, even when the glassware has not been used for storage."

Glass shards can also be very sharp.

Eating a small shard of glass will kill you far more quickly than any amount of chemicals from your spatula

Glass is not so harmless when you consume shards of it. Chemically inert things can damage the body by mechanical means (I’m a little surprised that this has to be said!)

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