Microplastics Are in Our Food, Too. How Worried Should We Be?
Erin Bunch | GQ | June 4, 2024
Earlier this year, headlines screamed scary stats around just how much microplastic makes its way into the water we drink out of plastic bottles, and it’s a lot. (An average of 240,000 particles per liter, to be precise.) Of course, plastic water bottles can be avoided, but as I read this news from my kitchen, where plastic was touching everything from the berries to the chips to the chicken breasts, I began to wonder just how much microplastic I was consuming daily with my food.
The answer, it turns out, is also “a lot.” A 2024 study, for example, found microplastics in 16 different commonly consumed protein products purchased in the United States. Study co-author Madeline H. Milne says her research team looked at proteins with various levels of processing, from seafood fresh off the boat to chicken nuggets. Based on their findings, Milne and her fellow researchers estimated that Americans ingest more than 11,000 microplastic particles a year via their protein consumption alone, and that consumers on the higher end of protein consumption could be taking in as many 3.8 million plastic particles per year.
Milne points out two different findings of interest from this study. “The first is that we didn't see a significant difference between the contamination in products that were seafood, terrestrial meat, or plant-based proteins,” says Milne. “When people think about microplastics, initially, they might think it's just a problem in the ocean, but what we found is that it's making its way into beef, chicken—all these land proteins.” The second finding of note, she says, is that all of the products studied were contaminated, regardless of how close they were to their natural state. “This suggests that this is a bigger issue than ‘pick this [e.g. fresh food], not that’,” she says.
Of course, you’re not going to avoid microplastic consumption by shunning protein. According to Melissa Valliant, communications director for the nonprofit Beyond Plastics, microplastics have also been found in milk, fruits, vegetables, sugar, salt, honey—basically anything that’s been studied.
How Plastic Winds Up In Our Food
It’s not altogether surprising, to Milne’s point, that plastic particles are found in seafood, nor is it a huge shock that they’re in the foods we eat that don’t resemble anything naturally derived from the Earth, like Oreos. But you might be wondering how they are ending up in foods such as fresh vegetables, which in theory should be relatively safe from contamination.
Unfortunately, says Valliant, microplastics are so prevalent in our environment that they’re in the water used to water those vegetables, and they’re in the soil used to nourish them. (Much of our food is actually grown on plastic mulch, which certainly isn’t helping.) And for the same reason, live pigs and other livestock are found to have plastic in their bodies before they even reach a slaughterhouse, let alone the grocery store.
Processing only builds on this early contamination. “[In our study], we saw that highly processed products had more microplastic contamination than less processed products,” says Milne. ”So for example, a chicken nugget was more contaminated than its equivalent of a chicken breast.” This added contamination, she says, could be coming from the time foods spend on a conveyor belt, or from the microfibers shedding from workers’ clothing, or from whatever machinery is being used in the processing.
From there, packaging obviously doesn’t help. While Milne’s study didn’t find that shedding from plastic packaging significantly contributed to the issue, she cautions that this may have to do with the size of the particles they studied. “Our study had a size cut off of 45 microns, and we couldn’t look smaller than that given the methods we used,” she says. “It's possible that packaging might be creating particles that are smaller.”
With that said, it’s inevitable that some plastic is shedding into foods from its plastic packaging, whether it happens as that plastic breaks apart over time (for longer, shelf stable foods), or it happens when you rip, cut, or—God forbid—microwave the packaging. (Do not do this, she says!) “Much of the meat we buy in the supermarket, for example, is wrapped in plastic, and you have to cut the packet to get the meat out, or whatever it is you're eating,” says Mark Patrick Taylor, Chief Environmental Scientist for EPA Victoria in Australia. “You're bound to yield some microplastics in that process.”
According to Valliant, plastic is continuously being introduced into the environment. “A good way to think of it is to think of it like your skin. So just like your skin is constantly flaking off in tiny pieces, which is gross to think about, plastics are constantly shedding tiny bits that can end up in our food or in our drink.” Taylor points out, for example, that plastic particles from your clothes may shed into your food, and says you can actually test this by leaving a glass of wine out on the counter overnight. When you look at the glass in the morning, you’ll see particles floating at the wine’s surface. “Some of those can be microplastics that, for example, shed from clothing,” he says.
Our food touches plastic in the cooking process as well, he says, whether that’s through a heated plastic spatula or from nonstick pans. Taylor even points out that at the end of the day, when you brush your teeth, you're likely consuming even more plastic from your toothbrush—so you’re eating it even when you’re not eating at all.
And yet somehow, Valliant says all of this is the least of our worries when it comes to consuming plastic. “Experts say the plastic we consume is nothing compared to the plastic we inhale,” she says. “It really is everywhere. It's in our food, our drink, our air, our soil. There's no getting away from it. And that's just going to get worse as plastic production increases, which it is expected to do,” she says. Taylor agrees: “[Microplastic exposure] is inevitable. Inescapable. Our whole lifestyles are structured around plastic.”
