PlasticList – Plastic Levels in Foods

Ikea makes one with ceramic burrs which also solves the issue most of them have where the grinder faces down and drops grinds on your table.

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

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

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 ...

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:

https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-m...

(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.

I've been using a mortar and pestle. Easy to control fineness and no plastic to be concerned with.

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.

It's (thankfully) still possible to buy all-metal grinders, ensuring one a reliable source of dietary steel.

Krell or otherwise.

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.

good option.

i like that too.

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.

> 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 "Are the intake limits correct?" section (and the whole report, really) is fascinating and worth a read, but just to provide a concrete example of why federal limits might not be sufficient:

3M began producing PFOA (the most infamous "forever chemical") in 1947. It has been widely used in industry, and many millions of pounds of the stuff have been dumped into waterways since then. PFOA manufacturers were aware of some of the negative health effects of the substance in lab animals in the 1960s. Researchers outside of corporate America began studying PFOA in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, PFOA exposure via drinking water began to get public attention due to a lawsuit against DuPont.

As far as I know, the US government had no recommended limit on PFOA exposure in drinking water between 1947 and 2009.

Since 2009, limits have become progressively stricter. (For the timeline below, I'm quoting https://www.nrdc.org/press-releases/epa-restricts-toxic-pfas... )

In 2009, EPA established provisional health advisories for PFOA at 400 ppt and for PFOS at 200 ppt.

In 2016, EPA set a lifetime health advisory of 70 ppt for PFOA and PFOS combined.

In 2022, EPA published interim lifetime health advisories of 0.004 ppt for PFOA and 0.02 ppt for PFOS.

In 2023, EPA proposed health-based maximum contaminant level goals (MCLGs) for PFOA and PFOS of 0 ppt.

A lot of these chemicals are newer and less well-studied than PFOA, and we may still be in the period where federal limits are hundreds or thousands of times higher than the true safe level.

I came here to be explained to how eating plastic is not only not bad, but actually good for you. And HN, as always, did not disappoint, like the other day when a guy here explained to me that lead is good for you and iron is poison, and if I disagree I should prove it to him.

Plastics provide an even more obvious benefit than alcohol.

What is the obvious benefit of alcohol?

Cheap, ubiquitous plastics have revolutionized every industry (tools, food, automotive, etc...). We wouldn't be able to consume anywhere close to current level without them.

Not saying that's a good thing. But giving up plastics (not just in our personal life, but across the entire supply chain we rely on) would probably be harder for the average American than giving up alcohol for a drunk.

Hay is often bound up into bales with plastic twine. Cattle happily eat bits on accident. They used to use wire, but that caused a much more serious problem for the cattle.

I visited the largest pig farm in Ohio and they grind up bags of old dog food, plastic bags and everything. Literally pallets full of expired food, just dumped into the grinder. Then they spread the waste and sell it as organic fertilizer, plastic is now everything.

I bring up raw milk because it is minimally processed (I don't even consume it personally). I used it as an example because it shows how much plastic is embedded in the food chain and ecosystem by looking at one of the least processed items on the list.

Just thought it was interesting considering they are 'grass-fed'. Is that just a lie? Or maybe it's something else, like if they're drinking water from plastic containers that sit in the sun all day