Aaaah. I’ve been whining about how I hate plastic for ages, but finally, some hard evidence in agreement that hasn’t been inaccurately discredited by Snopes.com!*
A webcomic I read recently linked to this article, which I think all you Imaginary Readers plus everyone else in the world should read. Why? Well, mostly because even knee-jerk anti-plastic folks such as myself will actually learned things that we probably didn’t already know. And even though it fails to mention some other drawbacks of plastics – like, when you do burn it, it vastly escalates the air pollution and greenhouse gases we environmentalists are so concerned about, and that many plastics used for food-related purposes actually do leech scary toxins into the things we eat, no matter what shoddy journalism to the contrary claims.
Anyway. Read the article if you feel like it, feel enlightened, la la la. :) I’ve always been freaked out by plastic and the way its taste leeched into certain foods since I was a little kid, and that feeling hasn’t gone anywhere. Even if it turns out to be perfectly stafe, it’s still kind of gross in my opinion!
*Pet peeve of mine with Snopes.com – when they discredited the “microwaving in plastics” article here, they quoted less than half of what the interviewed professor had actually said – and neglected to mention that he in fact described the exact dangers of plastics with hot foods, recommended avoiding the very uses of these plastics with foods that Snopes was condoning, and stated specifically that for cooking, “Inert containers are best, for example heat-resistant glass, ceramics and good old stainless steel”. While bashing Snopes, I’d also like to point out that the good doctor did also say that there are some plastic-based toxins that are worrisome but are actually different than the ones mentioned in the admittedly stupid hoax email. I understand not wanting to perpetrate stupid hype-based hoaxes, but you make just as big a mistake by only reading the first two sentences of a scientists’s explanation.