Previous Next

A Guide to Food Packaging

The most common food packing materials are plastic wraps and plastic food boxes. Plastic zip lock bags are used to hold food, plastic bags are used to deliver food, and plastic wraps are generally used cover food and preserve freshness, such as in the case of a cut water melon.

Consider the use of plastic bags and wraps as a protective covering for freezing food. When frozen, they stick to the hardened food requiring you to peel the plastic off forcefully. This can transfer micro plastic to the food and it is very likely that food would have been already wash and cleaned before wrapping and freezing it.

The intended use of plastic covers is to be utilised for few hours and then disposed off, some of them even offered for free when food is ordered. Therefore, their selling price must be cheap. This gives no incentives to properly manufacture the materials. Therefore, almost all plastic based food packaging materials are of sub-optimal quality.

Whatever the quality of plastic is, various studies¹² have found that food stored in platic bags gets contaminated by the chemicals present in plastic bags. The most common health effect of such contamination is cancer.

So, what should you do?

• Avoid synthetic disposables like plastic wraps and food boxes.
• Avoid synthetic non-disposables like plastic tiffix boxes too. They will break down at some point in future and you wouldn't even know. Also, people have the tendency to continue using things beyond its lifetime.
• If you have access, use organic disposables such as plant leaves. Banana leaves and teak leaves are very common organic packaging materials.
• If not, use metals and alloy food boxes, generally known as tiffins in India.

Previous Next