In search of glass or wood or paper or cardboard or...

According to a friend of mine who is a chemist, plastic begins to react with food in a matter of minutes, meaning that food becomes contaminated with greater or lesser quantities of chemicals, depending on the food, the temperature, and the type of plastic used to make the container.

Minute amounts of these substances, if not eliminated from the body, will build up over time. What may not be toxic in small doses or eaten a few times may cause harm in larger quantities or when eaten over a period of years. We don’t know what health conditions, if any, different levels of different chemicals may produce or inhibit. Did you know that arsenic used to be a beauty treatment (it gave you lovely skin)? Then it was discovered that the body does not eliminate arsenic. It just builds up to that final, fatal dose. Terminal beauty, indeed.

Since these questions are of concern to me, I decided to quit buying food in plastic. After some weeks of grocery shopping with this in mind, I have to tell you I am shocked at my lack of choices. Try to buy food not wrapped in plastic! Even when I buy fresh produce from the bins, I have to put it in plastic bags. The only cheese I could find that wasn’t wrapped in plastic was Edam, still cheerfully packaged in red wax, or Laughing Cow, its neat little triangles wrapped in foil paper.

Consider bottled water. It sits in plastic for days or weeks waiting to be consumed, and it sits mostly in warehouses and on grocery store shelves, not in a refrigerator. I decided to buy Perrier, which I remembered comes in glass. I found that even Perrier has a plastic option – and that is the only Perrier option in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

I decided to store food in glass and was amazed at the prices I was asked to pay (and all the glass storage containers have – you guessed it – plastic lids). So I went back to my old practice of saving good jars for leftovers and buying only a few of the nicer glass storage containers for use in the microwave or for those leftovers that need to be frozen. Peanut butter jars and spaghetti sauce jars with wide lids and the squat little salsa jars make great storage containers for leftovers – and they’re free!

I have found that it is possible to decrease my exposure to plastic contamination, but I have to be persistent and inventive. To eliminate plastic containers from my life I’ll have to move to another country!