phthalates from plastic have started to get a bad reputation for being endocrine disruptors. I don't know to what extent they are used as plasticizers in plastic bags nor whether or how much would transfer to the fruit. I hadn't heard anyone voice that association or concern before.

In the future, the wax orchard bags would probably eliminate this concern for your wife.

as a follow-up, I'd have to imagine the residue from any bag would be much less than the pesticide residue on any apple that was not bagged and instead sprayed.

Mark, you can be sure that for a couple apples its not going to matter a whit. I have wondered a bit myself about the issues for a large number of apples. Phthalates are not used in any food products, they are in PVC type plastics. Also the plastic in the bags has been extensively tested as food-safe under normal circumstances. The main question is what all that sun could do to them, something I doubt was as extensively tested. Overall I would not worry too much about food-grade bags.

This year I used the footies and some of them began to break up a bit. There was something slimy on the apples which I am not sure was from some slime-thing getting into the wet footie holes or something from the footie itself. I just washed them well. Since the footies are not food-grade there may be a bit more cause for concern there. But they are nylon which is also generally not a bad kind of plastic so I am not too worried.

In any case, do Surround plus spinosad next year, it worked great for me this year and did not require too many sprays total (5?) so overall is much less work than bagging.

Scott

Scott-
Phthalates are used in food products, they just have to test low enough for the intended application by FDA.

Mark,
We're awash in a veritable sea of poisons and toxins, and the vast majority of them are 'natural' - and many of those naturally-occurring ones are a lot meaner and nastier than the 'man-made' ones.
While I'm sure your wife is well-meaning, I think she's unnecessarily concerned in this instance. But, if you decide to follow her lead, just pack those apples up and send 'em my way - I ain't afraid of no phthalates.

Kurt, I did some web browsing and all I found was recommendations on switching TO LDPE (the stuff plastic bags are made of) from more toxic kinds of plastics. There have been no studies showing LDPE has health risks and I found no evidence of any phthalates in LDPE.

Scott

Here is a link that might be useful: Greener Penny -- environmental website asserting LDPE releases no phthalates

Kurt, Lucky, and Scott-

Thanks for that very helpful research and commentary. There's a plethora, nay, even a veritable plethora, of bad and nasty stuff out there-

But does that mean we therefore have to be ever more diligent to avoid it, or that there's so much already that a little more won't hurt?

Honestly, I just don't know. I usually just do the guy thing and sneer at danger; she pulls me back from the precipice just in time, I guess. :-)

Thanks and best again,

Mark

Mark:

To me, the whole "organic" movement is 90% hokum, and about 10% real health threat. The danger of plastic bags on apples, sun or no sun, would not even register on my threat scale. Of course, I am a born skeptic, and it takes more than a hysterical website or two to convince me of anything. The world is full of marginally or fully crazy people, whose imaginations can run wild.

Some of the real threats to the health of the American people are restaurant meals (easy, no dishwashing) that are making us the fattest people on earth, and aggressive driving habits that kill hundreds of people each day. These I can get worked up about. There are others, such as the use of narcotics, but that is a relatively small sector of the population and you can't cure everything. If you stay away from these really obvious threats, you can live a long, long time, even if you eat plastic bags for breakfast.

Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Don, you've been in rare form lately. Every group needs a observer willing to say "the emporer has no clothes." I think you're the odds on favor. (I think the technical term is curmudgeon and it's a worthy title, in part, because I believe the heart of most curmudgeon, if you're willing to chissel long enough, has a pretty generous center, packaged with just enough bluster to make it interesting.)

If Andy Rooney ever retires--and you're interested--I'll give my old friends at
CBS a call and see if we can get you an audition.

Don

Don & Don: Amen!

I consider myself a member of the "organic" movement, but I don't buy the wacky ideas which I like to think are confined to the fringes (I can wish, can't I?). What I greatly admire is the "natural farming" part. That means is use minimal pesticides and if using them, use those with minimal impact, which will also allow the beneficials to survive and do their natural thing; and, take care of your soil with lots of composting and go easy on the Miracle Grow.

Scott

Thanks all-

I appreciate your comments. I'm glad to be able to bring questions up without having to worry about being pooh-poohed. In spite of having been in the business (some years ago) of selling and handling a wide range of toxic organic and inorganic chemicals, including carcinogens such as selenium and sensitizers such as paraphenylenediame, as well as simple mercury, lead, and cyanide compounds, I'm uncertain as to whether the migration of chemicals into foods is well understood. It might not be simply a matter of whether there are more obvious things to worry about. If I were ungrounded in food handling (I'm a bakery manager) and were completely naive about chemistry I would have to simply take others word for it, but I have just enough experience to make me question things. So it goes!

We tend to be pretty resilient, we humans, and manage to thrive pretty well in the real world. But we are sold products by businesses which feel no obligation to be sure what they are selling is safe. They are supervised by bureucracies which appear to be either moribund or under criticism for being obstructionist. We'll probably struggle through somehow, but the onus for understanding what's going on is on us.

In a lot of ways it's just like the credit industry- but don't let's get me started on that- I've spouted off enough already!

Well, sorry to get carried away. Thanks for listening.

Best regards to all,

Mark

Mark, there are indeed many things not understood about food and chemicals. When I was looking up info on underripe peaches for someone here, I learned that there appears to be be a chemical in underripe peaches which a few people have a very bad reaction to (like fava beans) .. something not known until a couple years ago. Also, I think we have a similar view about big business: they are generally a greed&profit machine which takes a "cover our b*tts" approach as opposed to a holistic view. So there has been and will continue to be unsafe products sold. But there are also checks and balances in the form of lawsuits, consumer groups, laws, etc which weed out many things. In the end the main thing that really bothers me about todays big businesses is how they lobby government so heavily and effectively to keep the laws on their side and not on the side of the rest of us. Recently I learned that Monsanto successfully sued someone who had been saving their own seeds for 50 years to stop, because some of "their" genes drifted onto his plants. Whats nuts there is not the court, but the legislature that passed a law which made illegal in some cases the thousands-year old practice of seed saving.

So, my feeling is on the personal safety side the system works OK today, both because the science is generally good and the laws are strong and businesses know it. The baseball team in our town is not owned by the owner of the asbestos factory, it is owned by the lawyer that sued 'em (maybe the laws work *too* well sometimes). When it doesn't work as well is when risks are more nebulous: are some of the pesticides and other bad chemicals we bump into in our environment responsible for increased cancer risk overall? For food (or packaging), scientists can just go to the grocery, buy some produce, and test it. Its a lot harder to measure general environmental exposure to chemicals. We know some chemicals are bad, the question is how much exposure people are actually getting and how much we should tolerate. My dads golfing buddy got poisoned to death by lawn chemicals. Why? The studies didn't consider the case that someone may pop their golf balls in their mouth for a final cleaning. I am concerned about enviromental exposure to chemicals, its not up there with driving deaths and overeating, but its a concern. I limit use of toxic chemicals in my orchard partly for that reason, my kids play area is the yard which is my orchard. One of my daughters got elevated lead levels due to lead paint in our house. She was short of the "danger" category but it got me realizing I would rather err on the side of caution for my kids.

Scott

Back atchas, and then I will drop the subject.

Here in Montana I have the privilege of living in some of the most glorious country in the world, largely populated by "mind-your-own-business, hoe-your-own-row" types. People tend to be resourceful, self-sufficient, but spontaneously generous, and as a rule hard workers. We don't enjoy the nation's highest standard of living, but we get by, make do, and manage to make ends meet.

But I'm fifteen minutes from one of the country's largest superfund sites (Milltown) where an entire community's water supply was contaminated with arsenic by mine tailings that found their way here via the Clark Fork River from Butte, formerly the "Richest Hill On Earth. Now I understand arsenic, know how it enters the food chain in that river, and will happily eat trout from it any time I can catch them. But I won't make a habit of eating, say, swordfish or several other kinds of commercially available seafood because of questions about mercury, and I would never serve them to a pregnant or lactating woman.

We're also only about three hours from Libby, where the infamous asbestos mine exists. This is the question that drove Grace into bankruptcy (and which otherwise and elsewhere made USG such a screaming good buy when I first bought it a couple of years ago for our retirement portfolio.) I understand the risks associated with asbestos, and my attic is insulated with the stuff. I'm not moving out. But I know people here who have lost multiple family members to asbestosis and asbestos related diseases just from living in that town.

And speaking of lead poisoning, I'm glad your daughter's lead exposure was limited. In former smelter town East Helena, MT, two hours east, the yards and groundwater were unsafe and the EPA has removed many of them and replaced the soil with clean. Children there have been exposed, with many reaching danger levels, for years before anybody thought to start looking.

So it behooves us to try to think of these things. If our imaginations are a little energetic from time to time it may not be a bad thing!

Good luck,

Mark

ps- my Gala's are nearly ripe, I'll get a couple of Yellow Delicious, maybe a few Carousel, and lots and lots of Liberty apples. Some of them are not wormy, and some of them are.