PlasticList – Plastic Levels in Foods

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:

<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>

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.