Look Out for Flying Plastic

As my husband will tell anyone willing to listen, I am pretty paranoid when it comes to health issues. So, all I had to do was get a whiff of information that certain hard clear plastic caused stomach cancer in rats, and the plastic started flying out of my cabinets. All the Tupperware that I had purchased as part of fundraisers I had organized, ironically for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the American Cancer Society or my kids’ daycare center were swiftly ejected from the storage container area.

I immediately went out and bought SIGG metal water bottles for myself and the kids (my husband and I could share I reasoned). I also went off to buy Pyrex glass storage dishes for food. I bought 8 new glass containers in various sizes. I felt proud and healthy. Everything was going fine until my husband started begging me what he was supposed to put all the massive quantities of food I had made, into. You see, eight glass storage containers don’t go too far when, on one of my cooking benders, I make a vat of soup, a food processor full of homemade hummus, homemade French toast, homemade pancakes and turkey and meatballs, not to mention extra homemade chicken stock.

Of course I snapped at him (all that cooking making me a little tired) and muttered something about “well, if I wasn’t the only one eating all this food…” to which my husband replied, “no one asked you to make it.”

Wrong answer. At which point he got the whole “you don’t know how lucky you have it, a gourmet meal every night…” lecture that I usually give him whenever he responds in anyway to my dramatic sighs after a day of cooking. He hasn’t figured out that he should just shut up and eat. Okay, well maybe not shut up precisely. Ideally, he should rave about the food before him.

Anyway, the plastic is pretty much gone ( I have loads of plastic pantry food containers which I had bought after a meal moth crisis in my pantry several years ago) though I am moving to glass storage containers from IKEA for the pantry too. I donated the plastic containers to social service clients in a neighboring town which had requested food storage containers to avoid roach infestations. I did feel kind of guilty giving anyone these potential carcinogen carriers, but reasoned, better for them to address an immediate health concern (roaches, ick!) than an uncertain, long-term one.

Of course, as far as the water bottle thing goes, I am conflicted. I can buy the $23 aluminum water bottle, but how about losing it? That is quite an investment and I am pretty forgetful. I have already left it at choir practice once and luckily someone else picked it up and held it for safekeeping. I thought about just walking around with a heavy, tall glass. But then I figure it would be just my luck and trip over something, break the glass, sever a major artery somewhere and die. That would be the irony in switching from plastic…