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?

  • Shiggles@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    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.

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      I’m willing to bet that you’ll get more microplastics from the food itself (meat, plants, water) than the bag.