I'd like to see people eating food grown by themselves and local farmers that they can actually meet and talk to. Neither of our hopes seem likely to happen unfortunately.
The sheer cost and time it would take to actually show with a high level of certainty that a chemical liner layer is safe won't work for the commercial food industry. It's much easier to claim some new process or packaging is totally safe, send that to regulators who largely outsource safety testing to the industry itself, and move on selling what is potentially toxic.
All magic comes with a price, and the inside of Mylar packaging is absolutely magic. That is, it seems like whenever we try to science our way out of some food mistake, we end up making it worse.
Don't get me wrong, science has kept a lot of people from starving (although heavy nitrogen fertilizer use and monocultures are a challenge for the environment), but after a certain point, we started losing gains in health because we started optimizing for profit.
Now, we put pictures of nature on ultraprocessed food and convince people it's good for them, when all they really need is to eat an apple, which, unfortunately, has no marketing department.
Humans are smart, but there is probably no magic bullet. The safest food packaging is the skin on an orange.
If you think the average person's soil is bad, try looking into the solid waste matter that the US government allows to be applied directly to our crops. They basically take what's otherwise called sewage sludge, including all the chemicals we pour down drains, and spray it on fields as fertilizer.
This seems like a terrible idea “for the environment”. Growing food as massive scales, often times in places where people don’t want to live has incredible economies of scale in terms of water, and energy infrastructure.
Can you imagine how much water would have to be brought in to feed the people of Denver, CO, and the economic and environmental impacts of that?
I think you're reading too much into my comment here.
I'm not saying that the only change I'd like to see is people raising their own food and shopping locally. Our current system in the US is entirely based on the average person wanting to outsource responsibilty, not just with food but also with things like education, safety, and conflict mitigation to name a few.
If I could magically change the world I'd want to see a world where people live much more locally, with smaller tight not communities. Among other things, "the economy" wouldn't even be a concept to worry about. That's not to say money wouldn't exist, but there wouldn't be one overarching government tracking GDP data as though we're still in the midst of the world wars.
More importantly, I'd want people to want this world.
People are reading way too much into my comment here. I agree with you, it's idealistic and that was actually my point. It's not going to happen and, for better or worse, I don't think most people want it to.
That said, you have no way of really knowing how poverty or starvation would change. There isn't even enough context here to attempt to estimate such a thing and doing so isn't useful.
Ah! You’d be glad to know that “we” know how to do this. Films are an area that a ton of people have poured time into.
Two that I know that’d fit the bill well are Zein (corn) and Chitosan (Crustaceans, Mushrooms, although now we can make it in bioreactors). There are extensive studies on them, and there are a bunch of folks who have invested time in building food packaging out of them (although, maybe not in the way you’re thinking).
As far as I can tell, these materials can be made suitable with enough engineering to meet the task at hand. They are more expensive than current solutions, and perhaps the engineering would need to be studied more closely for safety, but what you’re suggesting doesn’t seem entirely crazy.
> I'd like to see a 'contact layer' be sprayed on the inside of all food containers.
I think that's what's currently happening and the problem is that things that work for that tend to be things like PFAS, which is why they have been used for that purpose.
And I'm not sure animal studies are necessarily great at determining the risk from long-term exposure to small amounts of things like plastics either.
If I understand the announcement correctly, it just applies to certain types of PFAS intended as grease-proofing agents. Other types of PFAS have been approved for food use by the FDA, and aren't being eliminated.
It's a voluntary compliance on the part of manufacturers, spurred by FDA efforts.
...a voluntary commitment by manufacturers to not sell food contact substances containing certain PFAS intended for use as grease-proofing agents in the U.S.
It makes me wonder how they were getting away with using materials that weren't approved as food-grade in the first place. And also whether there's been significant development of substitute materials over the last few years and how much of a factor that was, outside of any implied FDA threats.
The fundamental problem is that people want this stuff to be fixed, but virtually no one wants to sacrifice an inch to do it. So the only way things can really change is if a functionally equivalent or better replacement comes along.
The Montreal Protocol worked so well because it told companies/countries to phase out what was already an old refrigerant and instead use a more modern and efficient r134a.
If someone invents something functionally identical to PFAS at a lower cost and without all the toxicity, you'll have a global protocal signed in a month with everyone eager greenwash their PR with how they stopped using PFAS. And consumers will be happy because they don't have to sacrifice an inch of quality of life.
They just denied a petition to do the same thing last year. Actually, the petition sounds more limited in scope, if anything. I'm sure there's some nuance here, but offhand it seems odd.
threat, and believe it or not the food producers do ‘care’.
Reminiscent of talking with dairy farmers, who all seemed extremely worried of hormones and antibiotics in cow milk and really wanted to fix it. Both political leanings were not keen on what might coming out from cows and wanted the best for consumers
My hope -- and maybe I'm being too optimistic -- is that PFAS can be controlled at the source. There must be fewer PFAS producers than food producers, and the food producers don't make their own raw materials or necessarily their own packaging.
It sounds like they got a commitment to end it. Am I understanding that right? When will I be able to be confident that my food packaging no longer has any PFAS?
I remember a few years ago when a local "green" grocery store swapped out polypropylene hot food bar containers for cardboard compostable containers.
I looked up the manufacturer of these "compostable" containers and discovered they keep oils out of the cardboard with a PFA coating. PFA-laden compost, just what any gardener would want. /s
An alternative might be silicone coatings. Parchment paper used in cooking uses this. I worry about the impact of that on food cooked against the paper. Silicones can be biodegradable though -- one of the problems with exploiting methane-rich gas from decomposition in landfills is that it includes silicon-containing volatile compounds from decomposition of silicones. If you burn this in a combustion turbine the combustors and turbine blades get coated with glass.
That contact layer would be one of a fairly small list of very well understood materials.
And we'd run multi-year animal studies with tens of thousands of animals to demonstrate safety of those materials.
(Unlike current studies which might just be 10 mice for 3 weeks)