The Chemicals in Our Food

Reader Contribution by Sue Van Slooten
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They’re back! Or, they never left. A recent article on www.CNN.com examines the fact that phthalates are in our cheese products, specifically cheese strings (kids love those, and a lot of adults too), cheese spreads, cheese slices, and most damaging, mac and cheese dinners. Who has not had one of those? Well, most of us at least. The phthalate content in a mac and cheese dinner is 50% higher than the other cheese products apparently. 

So, where have we heard the name phthalate before? These chemicals, which fall into a class known commonly as plasticizers, hit the news waves big fifteen to twenty years ago, when it became known they were in children’s soft plastic toys. Think little yellow rubber ducky, the quintessential bath toy. They showed up in a lot of other toys too, and products. Outrage ensued, and some limits were placed on them, but only insofar as it involved what a child could fit in their mouth. Well, cheese strings and cheese products can fit into a whole host of mouths, not just children, but of course, children are so much more vulnerable to dangerous chemicals. What it comes down to is that we are feeding, in some small way, plastics to humans. Is this really OK? No. Not. Nada. Nein. Nicht. You get the idea. 

Now for the rant: Why are we still here, in this exact place, after all this time? Why are we still seeing these chemicals, not in toys, but now in our food? The answer gets a bit complicated, but it is because it is feasible. Easy to do. And unchecked. By that I mean, how well is any of our food tested, how well do we really know what is in it? Of course, it is very easy to say that all commercially and industrially produced food is suspect, which it is. But that is just too pat an answer. (These chemicals are known endocrine disrupters and are toxic to internal organs; to get a better understanding of what phthalates are and the damage they do, see Wikipedia page below.) 

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