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?
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Lol, no.
And within the next four years, it’ll be non-existent.
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
You sound like an aspiring journalist. Good luck with it.
The sugar in the sweet tea is probably far more dangerous than its food-grade packaging
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).
Ya you’re being poisoned no matter where you live. Get used to it.
Nobody tell them about aluminium soda cans
Or about freezing nearly expired foods.
USA bad. Uplemmy left
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.
Using the dictionary definition of a term like sanitary when applying it to an industry with its own specific definition, food prep, makes your argument seem like it is a bad faith argument. I don’t think that is your intent here, I just want to bring to your attention that your point will be missed if you use a term with multiple contextual meanings in & out of industry since it makes the argument linguistic rather than point by point.
Merriam-Webster, copied in for reference.
adjective
Of or relating to health or the protection of health.
Free from elements, such as filth or pathogens, that endanger health; hygienic.
“sanitary conditions for the preparation of food.”
Of or pertaining to health; designed to secure or preserve health; relating to the preservation or restoration of health; hygienic. See the Note under sanatory.
“sanitary regulations”
See under Commission.
Of, or relating to health.
Clean and free from pathogens; hygienic.
Free from filth and pathogens.
“a sanitary washroom”
You’re right, there is a usage of it to mean “healthy” in general, my bad.
However, I hope you can understand that it isn’t the most common usage, and that the bulk of the definitions and usages are pathogen related. Hence me either forgetting or not having run across its more broad usage.
I’d still use a different word, but I definitely agree with your point under that usage :)
That being said, sometimes something that’s not sanitary (using the general definition now) may still be the better option than something that’s worse.
Which is the case here, imo.
When you’re dealing with something like a soda/cola, you’re very often dealing with a slightly corrosive liquid. When that’s the case, you’re limited in what you can use to ship and store it in. Glass, obviously, is the superior choice in terms of maximum safety for chemical exposure. It is also much more expensive to ship, and has more bulk for storage. It also has a different kind of safety issue; the extra weight and the risk of damage leading to injury rather than just a mess.
The problem is the lack of choice for patrons. We can’t say “give me a glass bottle instead” and get one. It’s out of the bag-in-a-box or nothing these days.
As far as comparisons to other potential chemical exposures, the ones you listed in specific are a personal choice to take in at all. Whereas sodas, people might not be aware of the fact that they’re served from plastics. That doesn’t negate your point, it’s just an interesting distinction. The plastics in food storage is more like second hand smoke than smoking because it isn’t something you can explicitly choose to engage in, and opting out is problematic.
Mind you, I’m not certain that the plastics leeched into a soda are at a high enough level to be worse than the soda itself. They’re distinctly not sanitary, no matter what they’re stored in. Too much sugar, too much acidity, too many colorants and flavorants that are either neutral, or haven’t been excluded completely as possibly unhealthy. Just the caffeine levels in them are problematic, and the problems from the sugar levels will show up in your body years ahead of the plastics. But, again, you’re choosing to drink them, but may not be aware of the plastics to opt out.
Fwiw, my household has phased out plastics entirely for anything that gets heated, and for long term storage. We just don’t buy new containers as they reach end of life, and any food that comes in plastics gets moved to one of our glass or metal containers if the product is going to be sitting around for more than a week or so. Longer if it’s a dried product, since leeching rates for those approaches zero in anything under years. Which is only relevant so you understand that I agree with you that there’s no such thing as a totally food safe plastic.
Ive seen boil in the bag food in the UK. Not really sure what the issue is.
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.
Maybe you should make sure this doesn’t happen in other industrial countries before shitting on the US
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
NThis 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 fitting 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.
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
