It’s really hard to avoid plastic these days. It’s everywhere. A few years ago, when our first daughter was born, and before we all knew what BPA was, I did some research on the topic. It was all rather fascinating. Fast forward 5 years and you won’t find a baby bottle that contains BPA. They are all either made of Polymide.
By now you should know that there are three kinds of plastics
1) Good Plastics
2) Bad Plastics
3) Unknown Plastics
Good plastics are as far as we know, safe for things like food (including heating them up). Things like Polypropylene, High-Density Polyethylene, Low-Density & Polyethylene are all “safe plastics”.
The bad plastics, things like Polycarbonate, are almost gone entirely as containers for food items, replaced by things like Eastman Tritan. They look the same (clear plastic), but are branded with new “BPA free” stickers. But we still have PVC and Polystyrene (the coffee lids you use from Starbucks) which I am sure are leaching into our bodies (the coffee lids at Microsoft are finally compostable and made of corn).
That leaves the “unknowns”. Things like melamine. Your kids dishes and cups are made of this stuff. That is unless they are ceramic, porcelain, glass or stainless steel. But, sadly all those things break. It’s not clear if they are safe or not. I am a skeptical person when it comes to this stuff. We only ask science to answer certain questions, and the answers to this one are not conclusive. For one thing melamine will melt in a microwave, does that mean it’s not going to leech chemicals in a dishwasher, which can reach in excess of 100 degrees?
It’s seriously hard to figure all this stuff out (that is if you care to figure it out, many people don’t). I do care, so when I have time, I do research on the topic. We’ve pretty much tried as hard as we could to use glass and stainless steel with our kids. We look for things like borosilicate glass (that’s what Pyrex is made of). But for dishes I recently discovered something that’s been around forever. Dishware made by Corelle. It comes in lots of colors and shapes, and they have a lot of styles that will appeal to kids. The best part is, they are made of glass, but are really resistant to breaking. It’s basically a laminated tempered glass (like your windshield). They are readily available from Amazon and Amazon Fresh.
Here is what we got for Sarah:
And so far, she is a big fan.
Here’s to one less plastic food vehicle in our house.
