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?
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!
McDonald’s itself is poison.
Fun thing I learned recently: You know that pigs’ feed is made with whole bags of expired bread that are ground up? It’s too expensive in labor to take the bread out of the bag so they’re ground up, plastic and all. You think that doesn’t make it’s way into the meat that we eat?
If it makes you feel any better, this happens in the UK, too.
If it makes you feel any better, this happens in the UK, too.
That did make me feel better, thanks! 😃
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.
USA bad. Uplemmy left
Lol, no.
And within the next four years, it’ll be non-existent.
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.
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
Nobody tell them about aluminium soda cans
Or about freezing nearly expired foods.
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.
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.
Maybe you should make sure this doesn’t happen in other industrial countries before shitting on the US
look up preprepared pasteurized food, it will be an eye opener. you can pop a can of campbell chunky soup and eat it cold. science is amazeballs.
Those canned soups are precooked and just need to be heated up. Well, they don’t need to be heated up, as you said. That’s just to make it more enjoyable.
Food company profits are more valuable than human life.
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
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
