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deadbabe

Before food was packaged in plastic, what did people put it in? Metal?

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Wood boxes, baskets, sacks, pots, bottles, metal tins eventually.

If the food is slightly acidic though wouldn't that leech metals into your food?

That's why canned acidic foods are some worse offenders when it comes to leeching stuff.

There's a plastic lining in the metal cans now.

Acidic foods went in glass containers. I have old books on food preservation, and they talk about which foods can't be stored in metal cans, which must be pickled (or later pressure canned) to prevent botulism, and so on. There used to be a lot of knowledge involved in storing and preserving food, because the method had to be suited to the food in question.

Before food was packaged in plastic a lot of it wasn't packaged properly, went bad, and caused sickness and death. Plastic food packaging has saved innumberable lives and continues to do so. And that's not even considering the prevention of food waste.

The widespread use of plastic food packaging is relatively new.

By relatively new I mean within my lifetime.

There were not "innumerable" deaths in the US due to "improper food packaging" leading to sickness and death in my youth.

The only plastic products I recall from my youth were plastic bread bags for sliced bread, and plastic milk bottles. Everything else was glass, metal, or paper. I am pretty sure I did not see or touch a plastic soft drink bottle until my teens. If you wanted a lot of soda you got "The Boss" from Pepsi, which was a half gallon glass bottle.

IIRC, some sliced bread used to come securely wrapped in some kind of waxed paper too (in the UK).

If you know how to prepare it, a lot of food comes in its own packaging and you carry it in a basket or, well, walk it home and store it in a crate or a sack or on a shelf or in jars or hang it from the ceiling.

Waxed paper, glass jars and bottles, metal cans.

Also I imagine just less processed crap and takeaway containers in general. They didn’t have plastic wrapped baked goods shipped from another country. It was just baked in the store you bought it and served on a plate.

Some glass bottles can contain more microplastics than plastic bottles...

[0] https://anses.hal.science/anses-05066642/file/Chaib_JFCA_202...

[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/glass-bottles-actually-contain-...

I'm reasonably sure however that the glass bottles themselves are not contributing to the pervasive abundance of microplastics in the environment. The article also cites that it comes from the paint on the caps. I'm sure that can be fixed.

Since it appears to be from the outer paint on the cap, it's relatively straightforward to select bottles with unpainted caps.

In the article, scientists developed a procedure to decrease amount of microplastic in such situations: a blast of air on caps. But "just use glass" doesn't mean "microplastic free".

Are you not on good terms with any living individuals born before 1970?

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