At McDonald’s, I saw that their sweet tea comes from a plastic bag inside a metal container, which stays in there all day. That doesn’t seem sanitary. Then I found out some places, like Olive Garden, heat soup in plastic bags by putting them in hot water. Isn’t this like leaving a water bottle in a hot car, where plastic leaches into the liquid? How is this okay? Like, I feel like that would be so explicitly illegal in other countries. Taking a big plastic bag of soup and just throwing it in water for the plastic to obviously separate from the bag and be intermingled with the food…
It sounds a lot like poison, like it’s literally poisonous. Like how is this okay in the USA?
Cooking a food in a sealed plastic bag is referred to as “Sous Vide”, and was invented in 1974 by the french. It can also be performed in a glass jar, so we definitely could remove the plastic from the equation, but there are “food safe plastics” which have been demonstrated to have no known health issues when used for this purpose.
Some plastics, like BPA or PVC, are dangerous to consume/do easily leach into food/water, but “plastic” is a very broad term that refers to a lot of different materials.
Note: microplastics are a whole different story, and we’re not really sure how bad they are for you. It is perfectly reasonable to ask the question, but society at large has essentially decided the convenience outweighs the risk, and good luck trying to avoid it in your food.
I’m willing to bet that you’ll get more microplastics from the food itself (meat, plants, water) than the bag.
Some plastics are more stable than others. That said, we are admittedly far too lackadaisical with them in general.
To answer your direct question, we do have an FDA that does a passable job with some things, salmonella outbreaks, emergency vaccine development, stuff like that. There is probably some regulatory capture at play, though, where business interests get their people appointed into oversight roles. When a full half of our government is so vocally and rabidly pro-business, this is difficult to prevent in the long run.
A plastic bag in a metal container sounds about as sanitary as it gets. It’s far better to keep the tea in a sterile bag until it’s needed rather than pouring it into another, potentially contaminated, container and storing it there.
Based on your post let me ask you this: what would be more sanitary? Just to show this isn’t a post in bad faith
This post is all over the place, conflating plastic leeching with sanitary concerns, throwing out vague concerns and then panicking that there must be NO standards. To really answer it would require giving someone a comprehensive education in food safe materials science, likely fighting though many dearly-held misconceptions along the way. Anyone who thinks that plastic touching food is a health risk must have all their meals brought to them on a plate, and have no idea how food is delivered to stores or packaged for sale.
The question was rhetorical, I never expected OP to reply. Based on his other replies he’s just doing what he’s paid to do
Soup in plastic bags is the standard in most industrial kitchens all over the world.
Especially when you heat them ‘au bain marie’ it’s safe-ish. I don’t store food in plastic containers because even food grade plastic leaches but it’s generally allowed.
The sugar in the sweet tea is probably far more dangerous than its food-grade packaging
Indeed! Sugar is a chemical!
Wait till you hear the chlorine washed chicken news!
Chickens in the USA are typically “battery chickens”, which is actually about as brutal as it sounds. They’re kept in way too small spaces, unable to move around, and stand and sit in their own feces all day.
The chlorine wash helps them pass lab tests for lack of pathogens, because small amounts of chlorine get onto the test samples and kill the bacteria, but the chlorine is only surface deep. Salmonella is endemic, and many chickens’ undersides are actually rotting from being in their own filth all day. But if the bacteria test passes, it’s fine and the big corporation buying the cheap chicken doesn’t care.
Salmonella infections and food poisoning generally are relatively high as a result of these kind of profit-driven practices.
The boil in the bag thing isn’t a big deal by comparison, but no, the USA does not have strong food safety standards, the USA has strong lobbying and openly legal corporate funding of politicians that would be seen as corruption in many other countries.
Another reason to stay as far away as possible from there
first the bag thing is not even remotely a us only thing, and second heating food in plastic is sanitary (bc that refers to cleanliness). idk what term would be best for heating food in plastic, but I do agree it should be banned.
Sous vide?
I had forgotten about that… maybe instead of banning it outright it should be restricted to plastics that are certified heating-safe. in hindsight that should’ve been my take from the start as it aligns much better with my political views (in this case, it matters that I believe most things should only be restricted and not banned outright, an easy example being substances like weed and alcohol).
I’d worry less about the sweet tea and more about how contaminating your laundry is given the amount of plastic microfibers washing away with the waste water. Polyester is plastic. You deliver microfiber bits of plastic into the wastewater with every load of wash. How much of that is really filtered out?
If you end up in the ER or hospital, you will have an up close and personal experience with plastic. Blood: in a plastic bag. Plasma: in a plastic bag. Platelets: in a plastic bag. IV fluids: in a plastic bag. The tubing that delivers any of those things directly into your bloodstream: plastic. The syringes used: plastic. The IVs placed in your veins: plastic, including the catheter that sits inside your vein for the duration (heated to 98 degrees). The wrappers on each individual pill: plastic. The bottles the pills originally come in: plastic. Thermometer covers: plastic. The tubing used during dialysis: plastic. Tube feeding: plastic bottle of food fed through plastic tubing directly to stomach. A chemist or engineer could detail out what type of plastic is used and whether it’s a potential problem far better than I.
I question the “biodegradable” items used with seedlings. Why is the mesh from the Burpee peat pucks still fully intact in my compost pile after 4 years? Pucks baked wetly on a heating mat. Buy seedlings? Probably baking in the sun at a garden center in a cheap plastic pot.
A lot of shelf stable food is stored in plastic, and we don’t know how hot or cold its getting in the trucks or warehouses before it hits store shelves.
I hate plastic like the next guy but medical setting is prolly strong use-case for plastic as it must be single use and it must be cheap… Well not in America since we pay for elite level everything like true patriots.
But you get my point, a proper medical system needs to be efficient
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Yeah, but OP is complaining about plastic. There’s no particular bacterial risk related to anything they mentioned.
Remind me to not get you a Sous Vide kit for chistmas.
i have a sous vide machine. it always feels so extremely wastedul to use, but it does make really good food. i wish there was an alternative to plastic that i could use :(
I’ve never done sous vide myself, but I’ve heard canning jars can work as well.
Depends what you’re making.
My jar steak always comes out great!
Food company profits are more valuable than human life.
People on Lemmy will believe literally anything you tell them as long as you make it about a corporation or billionaire.
The example in the OP is very obviously food grade plastic, specifically engineered for those use cases
Ehh, kinda? I mean there is no plastic on earth that does not produce microplastics when combined with heat, but the science on how bad that is for people is very new, as plastic packaging for food is still relatively new.
We don’t know how bad or not microplastics are, but everyone is being exposed to a lot.
I’m betting hard that microplastics are actually good for us
There’s also an “acceptable risk” that companies will take. Not sure about food service, but I have been in meetings where 5% of customers fucked over is considered acceptable, with the dollar figures that follow. They probably take into account the total number of lawsuits they get for poisoning people, and the cost of the impact to the bottom line via lawsuits and bad marketing versus actually fixing the issue.
For example, if 10,000 people get food poisoning a year from iced tea, probably only a small percentage of those people will trace it back to McDonald’s iced tea WITH tangible proof. It might be easier to pay for those lawsuits than actually fixing the issue. They’ll pass some kind of memo out, showing they addressed the issue, and then blame the store management. Nothing really changes.
“A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”
My wife was an insurance adjuster for a major company, and that’s EXACTLY how it goes.
Which company?
Probably not collectively but for the people making these decisions it is.
Well, it depends on how much profit across how many companies we’re looking at, along with how many lives we’re comparing to. Also whose lives.
There are people who get paid to make these kinds of decisions…
Cue Zap Brannigan’s quote…
Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make
Maybe you should make sure this doesn’t happen in other industrial countries before shitting on the US
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Also, it’s sanitary.
Ive seen boil in the bag food in the UK. Not really sure what the issue is.
companies are very averse to lawsuits, so they will toe the line of what is legal. the FDA is supposed to maintain what is legal or not based on safety, but conservatives in this country are always trying to blur those rules for monetary gain.
that said, with regards to plastics there are many ‘food-grade’ plastics designed for these specific use cases.
id be curious of what other countries are more strict when it comes to the FDA. I’ve seen it about on-par with other 1st world nations. theres always a bit of differentiation when it gets to some specifics, but overall the US is better off than 95% of the planet.
now with the orange turd back in office, i suspect that will drop precipitously as they dismantle important organizations like the FDA and the department of education.
your ignorance of chemistry does not mean there are no standards.
