Excerpt:
Microplastics gush out of our taps and flake off cookware. They find their way into the yolks of eggs, and deep into meat and vegetables. But if we take certain steps, we can eat less of them.
You can’t see them, but they are there, hundreds of miniscule particles of plastic lurking in your steak. As it cooks in a hot pan, these unwelcome guests liquify, oozing into the meat before solidifying again as it cools down on your plate. And they’re not just in steak. Unwittingly, you are eating them all the time.
These interlopers in our food are microplastics and nanoplastics, particles of less than 5mm or between 1 and 1,000 nanometres respectively. But how do they get into our food? And, in a world infused with bits of plastic, what can we do to reduce exposure in our diets?
If you take a closer look around your kitchen, you’ll start to recognise where microplastics enter our meals: they flake off the spatula you use to cook breakfast, leak from the plastic water bottle you put in your child’s backpack and float in the cup of tea on your desk. They’re also buried deep within the foods we eat, from hamburgers to honey.
Once you start looking for them, the exposure points for microplastics can quickly feel overwhelming. But, importantly, it is also possible to make changes to reduce the amount of microplastics we are exposed to in our kitchens.
“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in your house that’s really easy to address,” says Sheela Sathyanarayana, a professor of paediatrics and adjunct professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
“I do feel like it gives people a sense of control over their own lives, and we do have that a little bit more than we might think…”
