I own a bunch of black plastic. Black plastic spatulas. Black plastic cooking spoons. Black plastic ladles. Black plastic (recycled because I’m thrifty … or cheap you might say) takeout containers. And I use them regularly.
For several news cycles last month, we have heard the alarm bells clanging about black plastic and that we needed to throw away all our black plastic utensils.
Hold on a second.
I must say I tossed a pretty-well-worn black plastic spoon when I saw the television spots and read a couple of newspaper articles, thinking maybe these carcinogens they said were present in huge amounts might be leaching into my spaghetti sauce. I hung onto most of them, though, as I try to research the research as much as I can whenever these announcements are made. I found some very interesting information.
I read an “update” opinion piece in another local newspaper written by a science editor at USA Today saying we need to put on the brakes because the research had a tremendous numbers error and the toxins contained in the black plastic in a bunch of different containers, cooking utensils and toys was NOT of an unacceptable level according to U.S. standards. Europe, where the research was done, may be another matter. I haven’t seen a retraction on any of the mainstream media TV stations, nor have I read one in any newspaper or magazine. I had to go looking. It’s a sad state of affairs that whenever we hear something negative, we immediately jump on the bandwagon and hate the accused murderer, or the plastic spoon as the case may be. Needless to say, lawsuits are now underway against the Environmental Protection Agency for allowing the flame retardants in electronics and other plastic applications to enter the recycle stream and be made into things that we put in our mouths, despite the faulty “science.”
Is this enough reason to ditch the spatula, takeout containers and other black plastic cookware in my kitchen, even though the allowances are “tolerable” according to whatever scientist thinks the limit should be? Maybe so, but I am going to keep using them until I don’t. It makes me think of the “Alar Scare” in the 1980s. A knee-jerk reaction to a study showing the widely used growth-regulator applied to apples to deter pre-harvest rot in apples (Alar) contained potentially cancer-causing agents, the Alar Scare caused people to stop eating apples. Picked up by the media and spread across the land, the myth that Alar was exposing apple-eaters to a carcinogen was debunked … too late to help apple producers, who lost millions and millions of dollars in sales. Entire apple crops were lost. Is this what will happen to spatulas? Is this latest plastics scare-thing going to do the same? Perhaps.
Though different in that this scare is not going to affect farmers and orchardists that I know of, it certainly is going to affect plastics recyclers, makers of plastic utensils and toys and all manner of things, and the retailers that are now trying to sell black plastic stock. There will be losers because a news outlet picked up a story and it spread like wildfire, even though it was not double-checked. My old news editor at a paper when I was a reporter told me that above all things, I needed to check the facts and my sources. Shame on the reporter that picked up this story without checking the peer reviews.
Not that I think things are unfounded when it comes to plastic, with microplastics now being found in our oceans, fish and soils all around us, maybe even in ourselves. It probably is not good that we ingest microplastics, but I don’t plan to eat an entire spatula in the near future. It’s not good for us to consume alcohol or any number of illicit and even legal drugs, yet we do so all the time — with informed consent. I will replace my black plastic cookware items by attrition, already replacing my worn plastic spoon with a nice, shiny metal one, but am doing so knowing that the news scare was just that, an unfounded scare.
As with all things, studies and reports should be taken with a grain of salt, though too much salt is bad for you, too, I am told. We need to stay informed, use common sense in our daily lives and stop the knee-jerk reactions to everything we are told on the internet, on the radio, on the television and by Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. We need to wait for multiple studies before we jump right in and throw things away, stop eating things, or change our daily routines. Yes, we humans have made some mistakes in the past and what we are doing today maybe shouldn’t be done, but we need to think about the unforeseen consequences and try to learn what our decisions today might be doing to us down the road. I like to take my time when making decisions, and we should all do the same.
Get informed, take your time, try to make the right informed decisions and stop listening to hype and echo chambers. All that being said, yes, I am eventually going to replace my plastic utensils.
