Flash in the Pan

Scientific American has an article about plastic food containers leaching the stabilization chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) into their contents. The last time I mentioned this was in connection with Nalgene, but, if this story is correct, it expands greatly on the topic. BPA is a stabilizing chemical used in many plastics, not just polycarbonate, and that there are potential health risks with BPA has been known since the 1930s. The chemical is also more ubiquitous in the food industry than I had realized:

BPA is routinely used to line cans to prevent corrosion and food contamination; it also makes plastic cups and baby and other bottles transparent and shatterproof. When the polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins made from the chemical are exposed to hot liquids, BPA leaches out 55 times faster than it does under normal conditions, according to a new study by Scott Belcher, an endocrine biologist at the University of Cincinnati. "When we added boiling water [to bottles made from polycarbonate] and allowed it to cool, the rate [of leakage] was greatly increased," he says, to a level as high as 32 nanograms per hour.

The chemical also leaches more quickly when exposed to other heat sources, like dishwashers and microwave ovens. The problem is that no one seems to agree on whether this is a health risk or not:

The Food and Drug Administration has approved its use and the EPA does not consider it cause for concern. One U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) panel agreed, but another team of government scientists last year found that the amount of BPA present in humans exceeds levels that have caused ill effects in animals. They also found that adults' ability to tolerate it does not preclude damaging effects in infants and children.

It does seem that the biggest problem is for infants and pregnant women, but who knows what else might be an issue? The plastics industry is pushing to keep using BPA because they don't have a substitute that would make plastics shatterproof and lightweight.

But the question comes up as to whether individuals want to take a greater chance than is necessary. (Polycarbonate containers, specifically, is usually marked with a 7 somewhere.) My family has been talking about moving to glass containers and away from plastic entirely, but we've yet to find products other than canning jars that have tops that can fasten down. I'll be doing some research into non-plastic alternatives and will report/review when I have something in hand.

Labels: container, contamination, plastic

As the New York Times reports, China is far from being the single source of contaminated food, which includes:

• black pepper, coriander powder, and shrimp with salmonella from India


• crabmeat, lollipops, and dried chili peppers from Mexico so dirty that it wasn't edible


• mislabeled candy from Denmark (impounded 520 times last year)


• traces of illegal pesticides on produce from the Dominican Republic

If this has been so prevelant - and apparently making China sometimes look like a piker, why is the media just getting around to reporting this now?

Labels: China, contamination, Denmark, Dominical Republic, food, Mexico

There are news reports that China has closed down many food producing factories. Here's something from industry news outlet ThomasNet.com:

Acknowledging systematic problems in its food supply, the Chinese government said it closed 180 food manufacturers and revoked 37 processing licenses of food makers found to have used industrial chemicals and additives in food products.

The notice came in a state-run newspaper in response to uproar around the world because of industrial chemicals found in food and health products. Apparently the ingredients were used from December 2006 to May 2007. And here's an admission according to Forbes.com:

The watchdog said it had found 23,000 cases of adulterated food nationwide in the six months, or 128 a day, involving 200 million yuan ($26 million) worth of products including flour, candy, pickles, biscuits, bean curd and seafood. Eleven cases have been handed over to courts.

Good that they're doing something, but, really, so what? Amazing that the government was able so quickly to pinpoint all these facilities. That leaves me, at least, with deep distrust and a suspicion that government officials must have known about most of this all along. According to Forbes, the government "claimed that cases of food contamination were isolated," but clearly it couldn't have really thought so.

Forbes also reports that it's unclear whether any of the cases being brought to court involved foods for export. But the problem here is that you can't just look at what products have officially been designated as exports. Counterfeiting is a huge problem worldwide. "It’s happened in the food business as well," said Neil Smith, an intellectual property attorney with Sheppard Mullin, when I interviewed him a couple of years ago about the issue of counterfeiting. "In some cases, oriental food products. In a lot of cases they’ll come in from China, or Chinese herbs like ginseng products, that will be counterfeited and you’ll see those in the wholesale market or in the stores."

If "regular" food products made in China can wind up with industrial chemicals as an ingredient, why would anything think that counterfeits would be an exception? The only difference is that the people who counterfeit are by definition doing something cut-rate to fool people. I see this as a complete PR exercise, at least right now. Perhaps there is a change in attitude among Chinese leaders, but they'll have to prove it over a period of years, and not on simply as an exception to business as usual. Let's not forget the second to the last paragraph in the Thomas.net story:

Despite that, Chinese authorities said yesterday they had logged 68,000 cases of adulterated food in 2006 and withdrew 15,500 tons of substandard food from the market.

That's a whole lot of food. I wonder how many cases they miss.

Labels: China, contamination, counterfeit, fast food