Authors: Joanna Blythman
What hard facts does the word ‘fresh’ actually convey these days? To be honest, this adjective is well-nigh meaningless.
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Every scrap of factory-made food we eat has to be packed. Packaging protects food on its long journey from the processing plant to shops and supermarkets, and to our homes. It carries the marketing images that sell the product to us, images that frequently bear very little resemblance to the product within. One Twitter commentator posted a picture of a sad-looking pile of unidentifiable red and beige objects in a black plastic container next to the altogether more beguiling image of reduced-calorie chicken enchiladas on the covering sleeve, along with the obvious question: ‘Dear @asda look at this. Do you think the food looks yummy just like the picture?’ A reflection that often drifts into the minds of convenience food consumers when the reality looks about half as delectable as the lip-smacking food styling and professional photography on the box would lead one to suppose.
A vehicle for both transportation and marketing, packaging creates the heft in the contemporary shopping trolley. In the lowest grade processed food ranges, packaging often dwarfs the food in volume. Those who bother to recycle food packaging will soon notice how those cartons, containers, wrappers, films, liners, cans, bags, bottles, lids and sleeves stack up. For those who don’t, the problem of excess packaging is transferred, out of sight, out of mind, to landfill dumps.
A ready-made pizza, for instance, often sits on a polystyrene disc, swathed in clingy plastic wrapping, inside a plasticised cardboard sleeve or box. When we pull off the wrapper, some of the pizza topping usually comes away with it, evidence of contact. In factory food, a number of polymer plastics hold pre-cooked ingredients in their sticky, clammy embrace, all the while exchanging body fluids. The film on ready meals that turns brittle once cooked according to the manufacturer’s instructions is dotted with steamy brown liquid that drips onto the food contents in the shallow plastic tray, a humid haze of reheated industrial ingredients and hot plastic. Prawn mayonnaise sandwiches and Peking duck wraps sit in the supermarket and takeaway shop chiller for 48 hours, oozing their sweet, oily innards onto the plastic and cardboard carton, a carton that has absorbed printing ink, and is most likely laminated with an ultra-fine plastic film.
To prevent the metal reacting with the contents, tinned food languishes for years at a time inside cans lacquered with epoxy resins – better known for their use as ingredients in glue – or various plastic coatings. Raw and more minimally processed foods also get up close and personal with a gamut of advanced food packaging materials. Supermarket meat is displayed on a plastic tray upon an absorbent mat that discreetly soaks up any blood, lest the queasy consumer is reminded that this flesh was once part of an animal. Cheeses – even those with an external wrapper made of waxed paper to create the mood of an artisan cheesemonger’s shop – are often clad in tight-fitting plastic underwear. Most people won’t choose the more expensive oil in a glass bottle, opting instead for the usual rigid plastic container. Children go off to school with a suckable plastic yogurt tube in their lunch box, or a stiffer plastic mini-pot of fromage frais. They drink juice through a plastic straw from a cardboard container coated with a plastic polymer, and lined with metal foil. Over-priced raspberries are presented like royalty on the red carpet in a crystal-clear plastic container, under a layer of ‘breathable’ film, atop an absorbent crimson ‘bubble pad’ that disguises any juice leakage; such pads can be supplied to packers pre-treated with shelf-life extending fungicides if desired. The insides of the brown cardboard takeaway boxes used by food pop-ups and stalls at outdoor events are coated with wax, usually petroleum-based.
The range of packaging materials and substances now available to the food manufacturer is elaborate and futuristic, with innovative new concepts coming onto the market constantly. Many forms of plastic food packaging, used for products such as ready grated cheese, are often treated with a microscopic layer of chemicals, such as alkyl mono- and disulfonic acids, aluminium borate and N,N-bis(2-hydroxyethyl) dodecanamide. They provide an ‘anti-fog’ effect by stopping build-up of dewy moisture in the container, or act as ‘anti-statics’, performing a non-stick function that allows foods such as honey, chocolate sauce and grated cheese to slip more easily from the pack. If, for example, you have ever felt cheated when those last remnants of ketchup remained stubbornly at the bottom of the container, you might be receptive to cutting edge LiquiGlide; although you are unlikely to be aware of its presence because packaging substances are not listed on food labels. LiquiGlide’s makers describe it as follows:
Liquid-impregnated surfaces are a patent-pending, super-slippery surface technology that comprise a composite of solid and liquid materials, where the solid holds the liquid tightly at the surface and the liquid provides the lubricity.
Reportedly, LiquiGlide was initially invented for coating car windshields and airplane wings, but it has more recently been reformulated for food use as a product to line glass, plastic and metal packaging for foods. When applied to the inside of a bottle, the walls are so lubricated that condiments that would normally stick to the inside almost fall out. Slick is the word that sums up LiquiGlide. Mayonnaise dispensers treated with it are due to hit the shelves in 2015.
As you can see, food packaging technology is tirelessly revolutionary, with up-to-the-minute, game-changing options becoming available to food manufacturers all the time. One of the latest films, designed to pack cooked meats, cheese, milk, condiments and salad dressings, is composed of no fewer than seven microscopically thin plastic layers, and is described as follows:
A multilayer plastic film comprising polyethylene outer layers with inner layers of additional polyethylene adjacent to tie layers of adhesive bonded to a blended polyamide and polyvinyl alcohol core. This structure results in excellent oxygen and water barrier properties. The film can be co-extruded in a blown film process that results in a durable barrier film without the sacrifice of optical properties.
Shall I run that by you once again? Unless you are an expert on polymer chemistry, this description may not mean much. Suffice it to say, this film keeps out air and moisture, yet still looks attractive on the shelf. Most of us don’t have much insight into the composition of food packaging materials, which, if they ring a bell at all, we more associate with non-food contexts, substances such as nitrocellulose, polypropylene, nylon, polyester, aluminium, polyethylene, polycarbonate and vinyl chloride are more likely to make us think of flooring, plant pots, clothing, computers, and so on.
If you mainly cook from scratch at home, this limits your exposure to such food contact materials. In the domestic setting, we tend to chop on wood, cook with steel utensils, and serve what we prepare on or in ceramic and glass, materials that have a long history of food usage. The exceptions here are non-stick pots and pans, and plastic chopping boards, both of which are controversial. In the case of non-stick, the concern is that when non-stick cookware is overheated, scratched, or even broken down at a molecular level invisible to the naked eye, a whole chemistry set of compounds come off in our food, notably fluoropolymers, not generally recommended for human consumption. And while plastic chopping boards were once promoted by food safety authorities as being more hygienic than wood, evangelical ardour for them waned when an independent study, conducted by the Food Safety Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, concluded that ‘wooden cutting boards are not a hazard to human health, but plastic cutting boards may be’.
These exceptions apart, if your diet centres on real food prepared at home, food contact materials won’t loom so largely in your life, although scarcely a soul will get by without using the odd roll of aluminium foil or cling film, some canned food, plastic milk bottles, and plastic sleeves inside cardboard boxes of dried foods, such as rice and breakfast cereals. Packaging is an inevitability of modern life. But heavy consumers of ready-prepared food are exposed to these materials repeatedly, on a daily basis. Over 6,000 chemicals are used to make food packaging, be it plastic, cardboard, paper, glass or metal, so whether it’s the supermarket sushi, the sandwich, the salad bowl, the smoothie, the sponge cake, the salami, or the soup, the factory-made, processed food that passes through our mouths to our stomachs cohabits intimately with packaging chemicals for most of its life.
Does this matter? According to the UK’s FSA, it doesn’t. With the customary nonchalance displayed by this body charged with oversight of public health, it assures us that food packaging is safe and meets European standards. ‘Consumers should not be concerned by the presence of chemicals in food contact materials if they are used within any limits or restrictions set for their use’, it says.
So that’s all right then … or is it? The Food Packaging Forum, a not-for-profit, independent foundation that examines the science around packaging, thinks differently. It constantly reviews scientific data on which chemicals migrate from food contact materials into food and beverages, under which conditions, and at what levels, monitoring research on the human health consequences of chronic, low-dose contamination. In this capacity, it recently warned that 175 dangerous chemicals are found in food packaging, chemicals defined by international chemical classification bodies as ‘Chemicals of Concern’ (COCs) because they have been linked to cancer, reduced fertility, genital malformations and hormone disruption, and so may present an unreasonable risk of injury to the environment and health.
The list of toxic chemicals routinely and legally used to pack what we eat and drink is an eye-opener. To give you a flavour, it includes substances such as formaldehyde, benzene, propylparaben, ammonia, toluene, perchloroethylene, carbon monoxide, asbestos and chlorinated paraffin. These are amongst the more readily accessible, more pronounceable chemicals amongst wordier inclusions, such as 2-octyl-(4-dimethyl-amino)benzoic acid, tert-butylhydroxyanisole (BHA), 1,2,3-trichloropropane, diisodecyl phthalate (1,1,3,3-tetramethylbutyl)phenol, (2,3-Epoxypropyl)trimethylammonium chloride, and 4-(1,1,3,3-tetramethylbutyl)-phenyl-polyethylene glycol nonylphenol, ethoxylated. Amidst this lengthy list of toxic substances are chemicals that have long been linked to chronic health concerns: phthalates in plasticisers; benzophenones in inks and plastic coatings; BPA in plastics and can linings; and organotin compounds in tins.
How can this be permitted? Food contact materials have long been in the frame as a possible major source of chronic exposure to chemicals, and in a horrible synergy, their toxicity can be increased in the presence of other chemicals that have the same mode of action. Packaging manufacturers are legally obliged to guarantee that their products ‘do not transfer their constituents to food in quantities which could endanger human health’, so who would expect that chemicals known to be toxic would be used intentionally in food contact materials? After all, many of them match the criteria for ‘Substances of Very High Concern’ set by REACH, the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals, the European Union’s chemical authorisation body. Under European rules, chemicals that have highly toxic properties must be registered and approved for use, but the guidelines do not cover food packaging. So perversely, although REACH requirements extend to chemicals used in the making of toys, paints, textiles, medical equipment and other diverse goods, they do not cover food contact materials, even though many people are exposed to them repeatedly, every day of their lives, sometimes with each meal or snack they eat.
Why aren’t packaging chemicals more controlled? Brinkmanship with potentially dangerous chemicals is hard-wired into the industrial food system. It operates on the smug assumption that known toxins have no harmful effect, provided they are at a low enough concentration, or dose. This comforting conclusion is drawn from the musings of the 16th-century Swiss physician, Paracelsus, who said: ‘All things are poison, and nothing is without poison: the dose alone makes a thing not poison’. This wisdom has since been condensed into a more clubbable phrase that has since become the foundational dogma of contemporary chemical safety testing: ‘The dose makes the poison’. Or, to paraphrase: a small amount of a poison does you no harm.
But when Paracelsus sat down at the table he didn’t ping a chicken tikka ready meal in the microwave, or quench his thirst with soft drinks from a can. His diet wasn’t composed of takeaways in polystyrene and supermarket reheats swathed in plastic. Nor was he exposed to synthetic chemicals in the environment as we are now: in traffic fumes, in pesticides, in furnishings, in fact in just about everything. If we time-travelled Paracelsus to the present day to note the ubiquity of food packaging made with chemicals that have known toxic properties, perhaps he might feel the need to update his words of wisdom. Real-world levels of exposure to toxic chemicals are not what they were during the Renaissance.
And many researchers now believe that some chemicals have unexpected and potent effects at very low doses that Paracelsus didn’t anticipate. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a case in point. Used to line cans, and to make plastic containers, it is one of the most hotly contested packaging chemicals. Concluding one of the largest reviews of independent, non-industry research literature on bisphenol A, an expert panel warned:
The wide range of adverse effects of low doses of bisphenol A in laboratory animals exposed both during development and in adulthood is a great cause for concern with regard to the potential for similar adverse effects in humans. Recent trends in human diseases relate to adverse effects observed in experimental animals exposed to low doses of BPA. Specific examples include: the increase in prostate and breast cancer, urogenital abnormalities in male babies, a decline in semen quality in men, early onset of puberty in girls, metabolic disorders including insulin resistant (type 2) diabetes and obesity, and neurobehavioral problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.