The package matters

Food packaging has changed a lot across human history. In the beginning food packaging included leaves, dirt, teeth, and fur. Food at this time was often consumed where you found it but then agriculture came along and as people had an excess of food to what they could consume in the moment packaging became necessary. Over the centuries the form of that packaging has altered considerably and while it has improved in some ways, a group of researchers have raised concerns that current food packaging may present concerns for public health.

The history of food packaging actually begins in prehistory when people used animal skins, shells, bark, and leaves. Ceramics and baskets first appeared around 6000 BC. The Egyptians (1500 BC) were the first to use glass containers. Up to the end of the 19th century, people used raw materials like wood, cork, clay, fibres (flax, hemp, willow) or processed materials like glass, metals, and paper. The 20th century saw the arrival of plastic, a highly convenient material for packaging and today the global food packaging industry is worth more than AUD$329 billion annually. However, while we don’t want to return to shells and skins, researchers are questioning the safety of our modern food packaging practices.

The new report is not a study but a commentary and comes from researchers across three nations at the Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the University of Barcelona. These researchers say that parts of modern food packaging that contact the food are frequently made of plastic. As well as plastic containers themselves this includes plastic coatings, laminate in drink cartons, and plastic in the sealing closures of glass jars. The researchers say that too little is known about long term exposure to these plastics and cite three main areas of concern.

The first point they make is that known poisons like formaldehyde are allowed to be present in plastics used for foods such as bottles for carbonated drinks. The researchers also point to hormone-disrupting chemicals like bisphenol-A (BPA), tributylin, triclosan, and phthalates that can be present in food packaging. Lastly, they raise the concern that not only are there these known problem ingredients but that there are more than 4,000 chemicals present in legal food packaging materials.

In 2012 Food Standards Australia and New Zealand conducted a survey of 65 foods and found there were no detections of phthalates, perfluorinated compounds, semicarbazide, acrylonitrile or vinyl chloride in food samples. They did find epoxidised soybean oil at very low levels in a small proportion of samples analysed. FSANZ said that these levels were well below international migration limits set by the European Union and don’t pose a risk to human health and safety.

This seems reassuring but the researchers in this paper make a relevant point in that toxic levels of compounds do not take into account potential cellular changes. They also point out that exposure to these substances while perhaps low level is long term and constant.

The bottom line of course is, eat less packaged food and you won’t have to worry about it.