No Stupid Questions

Cooking a food in a sealed plastic bag is referred to as “Sous Vide”, and was invented in 1974 by the french. It can also be performed in a glass jar, so we definitely could remove the plastic from the equation, but there are “food safe plastics” which have been demonstrated to have no known health issues when used for this purpose.

Some plastics, like BPA or PVC, are dangerous to consume/do easily leach into food/water, but “plastic” is a very broad term that refers to a lot of different materials.

Note: microplastics are a whole different story, and we’re not really sure how bad they are for you. It is perfectly reasonable to ask the question, but society at large has essentially decided the convenience outweighs the risk, and good luck trying to avoid it in your food.

Some plastics are more stable than others. That said, we are admittedly far too lackadaisical with them in general.

To answer your direct question, we do have an FDA that does a passable job with some things, salmonella outbreaks, emergency vaccine development, stuff like that. There is probably some regulatory capture at play, though, where business interests get their people appointed into oversight roles. When a full half of our government is so vocally and rabidly pro-business, this is difficult to prevent in the long run.

A plastic bag in a metal container sounds about as sanitary as it gets. It's far better to keep the tea in a sterile bag until it's needed rather than pouring it into another, potentially contaminated, container and storing it there.

Not sure if you're aware, but sanitary just means that there's no microbial growth that would cause illness.

That's a separate food from plastics leeching.

Based on your post let me ask you this: what would be more sanitary? Just to show this isn't a post in bad faith

Soup in plastic bags is the standard in most industrial kitchens all over the world.

Especially when you heat them 'au bain marie' it's safe-ish. I don't store food in plastic containers because even food grade plastic leaches but it's generally allowed.

The sugar in the sweet tea is probably far more dangerous than its food-grade packaging

Wait till you hear the chlorine washed chicken news!

Chickens in the USA are typically "battery chickens", which is actually about as brutal as it sounds. They're kept in way too small spaces, unable to move around, and stand and sit in their own feces all day.

The chlorine wash helps them pass lab tests for lack of pathogens, because small amounts of chlorine get onto the test samples and kill the bacteria, but the chlorine is only surface deep. Salmonella is endemic, and many chickens' undersides are actually rotting from being in their own filth all day. But if the bacteria test passes, it's fine and the big corporation buying the cheap chicken doesn't care.

Salmonella infections and food poisoning generally are relatively high as a result of these kind of profit-driven practices.

The boil in the bag thing isn't a big deal by comparison, but no, the USA does not have strong food safety standards, the USA has strong lobbying and openly legal corporate funding of politicians that would be seen as corruption in many other countries.

Remind me to not get you a Sous Vide kit for chistmas.

Nobody tell them about aluminium soda cans

I'd worry less about the sweet tea and more about how contaminating your laundry is given the amount of plastic microfibers washing away with the waste water. Polyester is plastic. You deliver microfiber bits of plastic into the wastewater with every load of wash. How much of that is really filtered out?

If you end up in the ER or hospital, you will have an up close and personal experience with plastic. Blood: in a plastic bag. Plasma: in a plastic bag. Platelets: in a plastic bag. IV fluids: in a plastic bag. The tubing that delivers any of those things directly into your bloodstream: plastic. The syringes used: plastic. The IVs placed in your veins: plastic, including the catheter that sits inside your vein for the duration (heated to 98 degrees). The wrappers on each individual pill: plastic. The bottles the pills originally come in: plastic. Thermometer covers: plastic. The tubing used during dialysis: plastic. Tube feeding: plastic bottle of food fed through plastic tubing directly to stomach. A chemist or engineer could detail out what type of plastic is used and whether it's a potential problem far better than I.

I question the "biodegradable" items used with seedlings. Why is the mesh from the Burpee peat pucks still fully intact in my compost pile after 4 years? Pucks baked wetly on a heating mat. Buy seedlings? Probably baking in the sun at a garden center in a cheap plastic pot.

A lot of shelf stable food is stored in plastic, and we don't know how hot or cold its getting in the trucks or warehouses before it hits store shelves.

first the bag thing is not even remotely a us only thing, and second heating food in plastic is sanitary (bc that refers to cleanliness). idk what term would be best for heating food in plastic, but I do agree it should be banned.

Maybe you should make sure this doesn't happen in other industrial countries before shitting on the US

Ive seen boil in the bag food in the UK. Not really sure what the issue is.

companies are very averse to lawsuits, so they will toe the line of what is legal. the FDA is supposed to maintain what is legal or not based on safety, but conservatives in this country are always trying to blur those rules for monetary gain.

that said, with regards to plastics there are many 'food-grade' plastics designed for these specific use cases.

id be curious of what other countries are more strict when it comes to the FDA. I've seen it about on-par with other 1st world nations. theres always a bit of differentiation when it gets to some specifics, but overall the US is better off than 95% of the planet.

now with the orange turd back in office, i suspect that will drop precipitously as they dismantle important organizations like the FDA and the department of education.

your ignorance of chemistry does not mean there are no standards.

Food company profits are more valuable than human life.

Lol, no.

And within the next four years, it'll be non-existent.

People pay a lot of money in fancy restaurants to have their food cooked in a plastic bag lol

look up preprepared pasteurized food, it will be an eye opener. you can pop a can of campbell chunky soup and eat it cold. science is amazeballs.

McDonald's itself is poison.

Fun thing I learned recently: You know that pigs' feed is made with whole bags of expired bread that are ground up? It's too expensive in labor to take the bread out of the bag so they're ground up, plastic and all. You think that doesn't make it's way into the meat that we eat?

If it makes you feel any better, this happens in the UK, too.

You sound like an aspiring journalist. Good luck with it.

We do; but fuck if anyone actually follows it and the FDA is corrupt as fuck.

But also the plastic thing? We barely found out everything has micro plastics in it and don't even know how harmful it is yet. Hindsight is always 20/20.

You're worried about a little plastic in a beverage with (probably) 50g added sugar? 2g of sodium and 40g fat but a little microplastic puts you off the soup?

Get a grip, honestly.

This is a very complex and nuanced issue seeing as plastics as a class of materials can vary greatly in its manufacturing process and if any coatings are used. Some materials have varing use cases, also new materials, coatings, and process combinations are created constantly. Additionally a material might not have noticeable effects on a person for 10+ years.

The American government could pass legislation and studies could be done for both old and new materials and manufacturing process with an introduction of an approval and inspection process. However, did you know that worrying about what corporations do to Americans is "woke"?

Ya you’re being poisoned no matter where you live. Get used to it.