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?
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.
The sugar in the sweet tea is probably far more dangerous than its food-grade packaging
Nobody tell them about aluminium soda cans
Ya you’re being poisoned no matter where you live. Get used to it.
Not sure if you’re aware, but sanitary just means that there’s no microbial growth that would cause illness.
That’s a separate food from plastics leeching.
That’s not what the dictionary definition of sanitary is. Seriously, go look it up. According to Merriam-Webster, it first says: Of or relating to health. Plastic leaching into stuff is not healthy. No one has ever proved that it’s safe. The burden of proof is always proving that something is harmful, and then it’s classified as harmful. The problem is, we don’t know something is harmful for decades, or longer. People literally believed that it was safe to have cocaine in Coca-Cola and that cigarettes were completely harmless. We also believe that vaping is not harmful, and that marijuana isn’t harmful either. Who knows if that’ll be discovered as being extremely harmful to your health in 100 years or so.
So to me personally, I don’t find it sanitary to involve something in the process that you have no idea whatsoever if it affects your health or not. I would call that unsanitary.
USA bad. Uplemmy left
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.
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
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.
Ive seen boil in the bag food in the UK. Not really sure what the issue is.
I’ve seen troopies boil the foil ration bags in the hot water, and then use the hot water for tea.
And we (twitch) turned out fine.
Maybe you should make sure this doesn’t happen in other industrial countries before shitting on the US
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’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.
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.
People pay a lot of money in fancy restaurants to have their food cooked in a plastic bag lol
Ah yes. Sous vide enters the chat
