One class of items not listed here, which I'd recently started to think might be less-than-optimal: pepper sold in jars with built-in, plastic, grinders.
I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food.
There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern:
Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist.
Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter.
Peugeot—yes, they of the cars—make an excellent line of steel-based pepper grinders, and a great nutmeg mill as well. Along with hoop skirts and lawnmowers and much more, apparently, over the 200 years since the family started their first steel mill:
definitely one of those buy it for life type of thing, very satisfying once you get used to it, and it does take time to get used to it. the labelling is carefully designed to fade away just around the time you got to know how to use one, masterfully done lol
The mechanism is probably good forever but the bottom ring is liable to crack over time. They usually last me a decade or so which is fine for the price.
I love them and have bought half a dozen over the years. My dad gifted me one when I moved out decades ago.
A good pepper grinder (and the Peugeot’s are top notch) is such an obviously valuable purchase. Lasts a decade and fresh pepper from a good grinder is much tastier. One of the best $35 to spend imo
My grandmother has a very old Peugeot grinder. The new ones are much smaller and look like the ones from other brands, but I guess with higher quality.
meh. I like the aesthetics of the Peugeot grinder but it is flawed.
Specifically: the grinder top is not mated with reverse threads. This means the act of grinding loosens the top. I have to stop and re-tighten quite frequently.
I suppose the design is perfect if you are left-handed ...
If it were the other way it would tighten with use and eventually strip the threads or crack the wood top. Anyway it's an almost unbelievably petty bit of cooking technique but there is actually a "correct" way to hold and turn a pepper grinder lol.
Your palm is meant to hold the nut in place. On the old ones the tightness of the nut was the control for fineness so it was necessary to hold it as you turned anyway. They moved that control to its own thing on the bottom a few decades ago (iirc) but kept the rest of it the same.
Thanks, I hadn’t considered the plastic on the pepper grinder. Guess I’ll be looking for a new pepper grinder as I continue my pursuit of removing plastic and dangerous chemicals from the kitchen. So far the pans, tupperware, and cooking utensils have all been replaced.
While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
I’m definitely buying natural fiber clothing moving forward for this reason.
However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching.
Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders:
(No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal.
I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
Your biggest exposure is going to be water, hands down. What you store it in, how you filter it, these are going to be major sources of plastics and pfas.
Agreed, already on it! I put Wedell Water filters on all of our shower heads and we have a filtration system for our kitchen sink water. I’d love to get a whole home water filter at some point.
Nothing says capitalism quite like a corporation polluting the entire planet with something they knew caused disease, actively gaslighted everyone involved, transferred liability to a sacrificial entity so they got zero punishment for it, and the rest of us are left to buy water filters for the rest of history if we want clean water.
3M and Dupont deserve the death penalty for it and should've been dissolved completely for crimes against humanity.
If only it would be so easy to blame it all on capitalism.
I've lived in communism and it was exactly the same. Pollution beyond any reasonable levels, testing chemistry on products and people, rules and regulations coming from government and faceless bureaucrats... The result was the same, but instead of corporate greed the reason was lack of any interest and foresight.
Well regulated capitalism is probably best equipped to deal with such. Whether ours is well equipped to deal with this is another question.
The problem occurs whenever there aren't competent and powerful institutions working to protect the interests of the people, so indeed.
But the thing is capitalism is a tremendously powerful machine, so it's really more dangerous than an unmotivated Polish bureaucrat. The Soviets may have drained the Aral sea but capitalism has poisoned the entire planet (with TEL even before PFAS).
Reverse osmosis is pretty much the gold standard for removing PFAS. You can get countertop units for a reasonable price. Look for the lab testing or certifications rather than random anecdotes since they appear to work fine to the end user.
As someone new to this how do the details work?
Do you need to buy a new membrane often like I imagine?
Do you have any issues with your water lacking minerals? (in the same way drinking distilled water is bad for you)
The model I have says to replace the filter once a year, and it's $170 AUD. I imagine you could probably get away with using it longer than the OEM recommendation though.
I had the same thought about demineralised water, you can get more expensive models which remineralise the water after, but it looks like it's not actually that important health wise because you get the absolute vast majority of your minerals through food, not water. And remineralisation is mostly for taste rather than health. Though I don't find the demineralised water tastes bad, but if you're used to drinking hard water it might be different.
Do you happen to know of any 10" water filter enclosures that are not made of plastic? I recently started looking for a two-stage one (meaning two enclosures connected in series) but haven't found one yet.
Same here. I am going to disassemble the cheap pepper grinders I recently bought to make sure there is no plastic in the grinding operation.
I switched to bamboo toothbrushes from plastic a while ago, before de-plasticizing was really a thing. Now I'm glad I did, because plastic bristles grinding against my teeth seems like an easy way for plastic to get inside my body. The bamboo toothbrushes are pretty nice too, the bristles are soft but firm, and the handle is made of bamboo too.
All disposable grinders are going to be plastic, and likely none of the refillable ones will be since the plastic burrs only last one usage before they are all chipped off in to your food.
and... plastic is not that hard, so the teeth should be able to grind down the plastic bristles as you brush your teeth. I'd find it hard to believe that no plastic is lost during brushing of teeth.
The idea of brushing my teeth with plastic has lost its appeal for me and will never be recovered.
I am a huge fan of Unicorn Pepper Mills: https://www.unicornmills.org/ as a buy-it-for-life item that truly works better than alternatives. That said, they do have plastic bodies, but the grinder mechanism is entirely made from metals and ceramic.
> After reading about micro plastics in the disposable salt and pepper grinders from the big box, stores broke down and bought these very nice all metal mechanism grinders.
Posting ones "just bought" product to "BuyItForLife" is an irony I had not thought of before. Especially considering one of the metal grinders contains salt...
It's a dream of mine to learn enough stoneworking to turn a pair of stones from a local river into a mortar and pestle, ideally without contracting silicosis at the same time. Much cooler than shipping granite mined and cut on the other side of the globe.
metal ones are also available in india, made of stainless steel and maybe other metals instead.
traditionally, people in india used a thick flat wide stone and a thick cylindrical stone grinder applied back and forth on top of the lower stone, to grind spices, onion, ginger, chilllies, turmeric, etc., into a paste or masala, which was then used in making curries, sambar, and other dishes.
Traditionally grinding things with stone ended up with people eating stone which ground their teeth down[1]:
> "A. When soft stone like sandstone was used for milling grain, as the ancient Egyptians often did, residue from millstones could cause a serious problem over a lifetime, said Dr. Robert K. Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Egyptian teeth have been well studied in mummies, and only the rare mummy had good teeth, said Dr. Ritner, who lectures on Egyptian medicine. ''They usually had heavy abrasion, and were sometimes so worn down at the crown that the pulp or even the root was exposed, which must have been horribly painful,'' he said. The Egyptians were obsessive about cleanliness, using a natural soda compound called natron for cleaning the mouth and sometimes a chewing reed to massage the teeth. They had few cavities, and the damage seen in studies pioneered by the English researcher F. Filce Leek almost certainly resulted from the residue of disintegrating millstones."
also called aattukallu in tamil and iman dasta (iirc) in hindi or urdu, but searching for the latter only gave results for mortars and pestles, which are not the same thing as the one above, the ammikallu.
Kind of surprised there’s no mention of Fletchers’ Mill [0] here, they’re good quality mills made in Maine. The pepper mills use stainless steel while the salt mills use nylon (corrosion resistance), so you’d have to look elsewhere for salt.
Personally I just dump kosher salt into a salt cellar and call it a day but I am sure there are plastic-free salt mills out there somewhere.
Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though? I don't remember the details, but the Veritasium video on this subject suggested that the scraped teflon you ingest from pans is less significant than the plastic that leeches into food in products like microwave popcorn. I assume this has to do with the reaction between the substance being contained (popcorn oil, in this case) and the item containing it (plastic-lined paper).
If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.
> Is the plastic you ingest this way significant though?
The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question?
Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons.
A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space.
Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero".
That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem.
Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method.
Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
Teflon is typically not the issue, it's very non-reactive and non-sticky (duh), meaning it just passes through.
Attaching such material to metal takes some serious chemistry, though.
The why is that plastic is an extremely convenient, cost effective way to make lots of things. And the evidence that it was deleterious to human health was negligible.
And to be fair, it's still fairly uncertain. We demonstrated endocrine problems with BPA, but aside from that microplastic consequences on health still seems uncertain. At best we're mostly doing the correlation/causation thing that leads people down a confusing path of cure-alls and snake oil.
If there was a smoking gun for the consequences of this in our day to day living, surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
[1] - ha ha, who am I kidding. In reality industry groups would muddy the waters, try to pretend it's "political", finance astroturfing groups, and soon enough a certain segment of society will be proudly clutching onto their microplastics, demanding higher dose services, and ascribing it with magical cure-all powers.
> surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food.
There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern:
<https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/103003/microplas...>
Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist.
Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter.
<https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/plastic-grinders>
(Archive of current state: <https://archive.is/yIIX4>