Let’s Talk Food: Food for thought

The effects of plastic on our environment

France will be the first country in the world to ban plastic dinnerware in the year 2020. All picnicware must be bio-sourced and compostable equivalent. That means no plastic plates, cups and cutlery.

Currently, 5 billion plastic goblets are thrown into landfills each year.

This sounds wonderful as the old-fashioned wicker picnic hamper with real china, silverware and wine goblets will become the way to pack a picnic lunch, which I personally prefer.

Hopefully, France’s stand on this global problem might influence other countries to also ban plastic in the future. Think about this, in 2014 worldwide, 300 metric tons of plastic were produced. If countries do not stop this, by the year 2050, that number is expected to triple.

With the lifespan of the average plastic bag, bottle or picnic fork of 1,000 years and one-third ending up in the ocean, we need to address this problem now. Hawaii has been progressive in banning plastic grocery bags. I notice the effects of this by seeing less of these once common bags floating in the ocean. Is our challenge now to ban plastic water bottles?

The problem is that plastic doesn’t biodegrade, but is oxidized in presence of sunlight thereby causing it to become brittle. It shatters into tiny fragments, then becomes poison to marine mammals, fish, seabirds, sea turtles, seals, sea lions, whales and dolphins.

There are seven types of plastics, according to the Columbia University Earth Engineering Center, but only two are recycled: PET, used to make 50 billion water bottles, and HDPE, which is found in milk bottles, laundry detergents and juices. However, we only recycle 6.5 percent. According to Eco Watch, the average American tosses out 185 pounds of plastic per year.

In our landfills, chemicals from buried plastic leach into our environment and groundwater. Some of these chemicals include phytalates and bisphenol A, which have been proven to cause health problems.

Eight percent of the global oil goes to make plastic annually.

The Earth Engineering Center states the energy trapped in plastic buried in landfills is equivalent to produced by:

• 36.7 million tons of coal.

• 130 million barrels of oil or 783 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

In Hawaii, we will feel the effects soon and it will be in our face as the world’s largest garbage patch, a floating mass of trash twice the size of Texas, is midway between Hawaii and California. The second similar patch is between Hawaii and Japan.

If we keep using plastics, within the next 35 years there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

We can invest in technologies to convert plastic from water bottles into fuel and use less plastic to make a difference for our environment and our world.

India is dumping 120 billion pieces of plasticware annually, so a company there, Bakey’s Edible Cutlery, followed Mahatma Gandhi’s words, “Be the change you want to see,” and with its motto, “You too can make the difference,” created an edible spoon made of flours of sorghum, rice and wheat. There are no chemicals, preservatives, fat, emulsifiers, artificial coloring or fat. To make the spoons taste good, the company even adds salt. Their spoons come in plain, sweet or savory. If you do not eat it, the cutlery disintegrates in less than three days when placed in moist soil and if you pour water on it.

A minimum order of 100 spoons can be made online and the company is working on producing forks, soup spoons, dessert spoons and chopsticks. In the near future, salad bowls will be introduced. Every product is custom made and designed locally.

I hope I got some of you thinking. Perhaps we have innovative folks out there who can invent some edible cutlery as well, with ingredients readily available on the islands. Or could we make cutlery out of albizia trees?

Organic foods

We think organic foods are better for us and pay more for them, but are they better for us?

“Mayo Clinic and USDA claim there is no scientific evidence that organic food is nutritionally better than conventional food or of better quality. Additionally, organic foods may have a lower shelf life because they don’t contain preservatives,” according to Policy Mic.

“Thousands of cases a year of food illness are triggered from organic products,” said Stuart Smyth, a professor in the University of Saskatchewan Bioresource Policy, Business and Economics Department. “It’s largely due to the process of them using manure slurry as fertilizer and coming down to improper household food preparations in terms of making sure that they’re washing organic food.”

Remember, just because foods are organic, that does not mean they are safer than nonorganic foods. They still need to be washed well.

According to the Journal of Food Protection:

• 8 of 18 foodborne illness outbreaks linked to organic foods between 1992 and 2014 were caused by produce items. There were 18 outbreaks, 79 illnesses, 258 hospitalizations and three deaths.

• Salmonella sp. contributed to 44 percent of the outbreaks, with E.coli 0157:H7 contributing to 33 percent.

Breaking it down further, there were 18 produce incidences; four from unpasteurized dairy, two from eggs, two from nut and seed products and two from multiple-ingredient foods.

Email Audrey Wilson at audreywilson808@gmail.com.