25-10 - Flipbook - Page 22
Hephzibah
Ministries
Your kitchen is full of
microplastics. Here's how to eat
less of them
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.
Ally Hirschlag and Martha Henriques
