i see posts and articles about microplastics and forever chemicals in human blood and i'm like bestie i still haven't managed to process the fact that we're basically all drinking heavy metals in our drinking water, no matter how good our ciites' water filtration systems are. i simply can't be internalizing these other things right now
@rigormorphis god yeahhhhh, my partner has been catastrophising about recent news about ziploc bags leaching microplastics when frozen or microwaved, and I'm just like, we're all being poisoned by everything, I get zillions of microplastics just from existing in the modern world, shunning plastic bags for freezer storage is not something I can get worked up about rn...
@soph_sol @rigormorphis The, uhhhhh good??? news is that I read that study and the microplastics drop off sharply after the second use, so you know. Just keep using your shitty plastics forever, and never use a new bottle or ziplock. You might get macroplastics as the whole thing falls apart, but you're limiting your microplastics!
@soph_sol @rigormorphis although actually that's freezer use, can't speak to the microwave thing
@Betty @soph_sol @rigormorphis we stopped using plastic cutting boards and we stopped microwaving leftovers or takeout on plastic because those are easy and it cost us whatever two IKEA cutting boards cost but otherwise 🤷 what are you gonna do
@serenadestrong @Betty @rigormorphis I stopped using plastic cutting boards bc I could see the way repeated scoring with sharp knives brought up macroplastics! but I still microwave in plastic containers semi-regularly....a lot of ceramic dishes, even new modern ones, will not promise that they are lead free. so like. damned either way?? do my choices even matter.
@soph_sol @serenadestrong @rigormorphis You can get a lead tester kit, but I will say, if your white dishes do not get, like *suspiciously* hot in the microwave, they probably don't have lead in them, and if they're not white, they almost definitely don't.
@Betty what counts as suspiciously hot? I have a modifier of like -2 to heat resist so every dish coming out of a microwave is too hot lol
@soph_sol IDK, I just know I had one white mug that got alarmingly hot compared to all the rest and I was like "...why does just the ... .oh." and then I didn't use that mug anymore.
with lead tbh i do also worry a bit about clear glass, which was leaded for a long time to improve clarity and can be recycled almost infinitely so if the company is not testing the glass they use…
my partners mom very nicely bought us some glassware last year which, unbeknownst to her, came with a little note from the manufacturer like “california prop 65 wants us to test and warn for lead but we refuse to test for it so we just say all our products contain lead fuck you”
@soph_sol @Satsuma Yeah, cut glass has a decent chance of being leaded.
The good (???) thing about glass is that every adulterant you put in it changes its character, which is why glass is actually really rarely recycled, since you can't know the adulterants in random glass, and you usually want a specific thing from the glass you're making (shatter resistance, or heat resistance, or clarity, or ...)
Often glass is just "recycled" into concrete or sand or fibre glass.
@Betty I knew glass wasn't a valuable recyclable from Local Politics but I didn't know why! Fascinating
Am I just not worried enough about lead?I have wine in cut crystal 4x/year at my parents house and my assumption is there's a million things that are going to lower my life expectancy first
@serenadestrong Like many modern things, hard to know what the real risk is! Should we be panicking, or ignoring it!? But if I were planning to gestate or breast feed, I'd probably feel like I should figure out how to remove lead from my diet. Once you're an adult, the range of bad outcomes is narrower and the doses needed are higher.
@Betty unfortunately what you learn when breastfeeding is all your root vegetables have possibly high levels of different heavy metals due to historic or current environmental destruction and the best you can do is pay a lot of money for baby food brands who say they do independent testing and eat a variety of foods 🙃🙃🙃
Also don't feed infants rice cereal because of high arsenic levels
@serenadestrong @Betty ohhhh lord. amazing how we're not all dead tbh!
@serenadestrong rice grown anywhere cotton was industry is full of arsenic!! It's not great!
@serenadestrong @Betty when i told my mom about the forbidden rice, she was like 日子不要过了 (is life not worth living)
though further investigation showed that california rice is probably fine? comparatively
@superborb @serenadestrong You can reduce your exposure by like, finding out where your rice comes from but also. Why do I have to become a supply chain expert in every fuckin thing that enters my house???? What if there were an agency???
@soph_sol @Betty yeah my understanding is that leaded glass is *relatively* unlikely to put lead in your bloodstream (unlike, say, lead paint or gasoline which both super defo did in high volumes) esp if it has been recycled and therefore diluted. But would still rather have zero lead in my glass personally! do not feel like this is unreasonable at all and yet!!!
@Satsuma @Betty yeah tho if you leave acidic food/drink in leaded glass to sit for even a little while, I gather that drastically increases the leached lead. (eg, don't use antique crystal decanters for your alcohol! no matter how cool they look!!) (also don't use lead crystal for serving pickles. a thing one of my grandmothers always did, and then my mom inherited her pickle dish and does too....)
@Betty @soph_sol yikes yeah no thank you to the lead glass pickle dish!
i don’t know if this is particularly comforting but the good news is if your mom is just using inherited dishes, she is probably serving a lot less lead up at her table than your grandmother did when those were new? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/027869159490202X?via%3Dihub
@Satsuma @Betty oh BOY. yeah I do not trust glass either! esp vintage cut glass pieces. the likelihood of it being lead crystal is just so high!