What Your Food Touches
Every day your food touches a pan, a container, a board, a spoon. Most of us never chose those materials — they came with the kitchen. This page is what the science says they leave behind, and the handful of changes that matter most.
Each figure is one person in a hundred. Sources: CDC/NIEHS (NHANES); Lehmler et al., ACS Omega, 2018.
Nobody drank a bottle of these. They arrive in tiny doses, every day — from water, packaging, dust, and whatever touches food while it's hot. You can't control most of that. You can control your kitchen.
How you cook
Most nonstick pans are coated with PTFE, part of the PFAS family. New and treated gently, it's stable. But pans don't stay new — they scratch, chip and overheat. In 2022, researchers at Flinders University measured what a worn coating sheds. One scratch: about 9,100 plastic particles. A broken coating: about 2.3 million. See for yourself:
One scratch ≈ 9,100 particles. Their estimate, not ours — Luo et al., Science of The Total Environment, 2022.
Now picture the whole coating going: their measurement for a broken coating was about 2,300,000 micro- and nanoplastics.
The scratches don't wipe off. Neither do the particles.
In 2023, the WHO's cancer agency (IARC) classified PFOA — the chemical long used to make these coatings — as carcinogenic to humans, its highest category. Newer coatings skip PFOA. They're still PFAS, and "PFOA-free" says nothing about what a coating becomes as it wears.
Sources: Luo et al., 2022; IARC Monographs Vol. 135, 2023.
Cook on a surface with no coating to wear off: stainless steel, cast iron or carbon steel. Relearning eggs takes a week. A scratch never un-scratches.
How you store and reheat
Plastic containers are fine at being containers. They fail at heat. In 2023, University of Nebraska–Lincoln researchers measured what a microwave pulls out of one: up to 4.22 million microplastics and 2.11 billion nanoplastics per cm² — in three minutes. Dishwashers and long storage of acidic or fatty food do the same, slowly. Press start:
Their measurement, not ours — Hussain et al., Environmental Science & Technology, 2023.
Then there's what's in the plastic. In 2023, Europe's food safety authority cut BPA's tolerable daily intake by roughly 20,000×. Most products just switched to BPS or BPF — close relatives, already in most of us.
Sources: Hussain et al., 2023; EFSA opinion on bisphenol A, 2023.
Never heat food in plastic. Leftovers go in glass — borosilicate survives freezer and oven. If a lid must flex: platinum silicone, not plastic.
How you stir
The utensil spends the longest time in the hottest food — and most cheap ones are plastic. In 2024, researchers counted what those shed while cooking: ≈2 microplastics per session when new, ≈5 once worn. Thousands a year, by the study authors' estimate. Germany's risk agency's advice for plastic in hot food is the literal title of its opinion: keep contact "as brief as possible." Dinner won't stir itself:
Their counts, not ours — Science of The Total Environment, 2024. Each full stir = one session with a worn utensil. The "as brief as possible" advice: BfR Opinion 036/2019.
And tomato soup is the lab torture test by accident — hot and acidic at once, the same stress we pay laboratories to run on our own materials below.
Stir with one-piece wood or platinum-cured silicone. Neither comes with a stopwatch.
Why small amounts still matter
Every one of them touches a pan, a container, a board, a spoon.
None of these is dramatic alone. That's the point: they repeat, three a day, from several sources at once — and regulators keep lowering what counts as acceptable, never raising it. We won't tell you a pan will make you sick. We'll tell you what the agencies say, and that fewer is better. Fewer takes one week:
Five things you can do this week
Tap them as you go. The page remembers.
-
Stop heating food in plastic.
Move it to a plate or glass first. The biggest change, and it's free. -
Retire the scratched nonstick pan.
If you can see metal through the coating, it's already shedding. -
Move leftovers to glass.
Start with the containers that go in the microwave. -
Take the plastic spoon out of the pot.
You stirred ours; you know how this goes. One-piece wood or platinum silicone. -
Check what's on your wooden board and spoons.
If the care label says mineral oil (refined petroleum), switch to a beeswax-and-plant-oil wax.
All five. That's the whole list — the rest is just cooking.
How we make sure we're not part of the problem
We make kitchenware from four materials — borosilicate glass, 316 stainless steel, platinum-cured silicone, and FSC-certified acacia finished with beeswax and flaxseed oil. No plastic touches food. No petroleum touches wood. Then we pay independent labs to check. Light Labs (Ann Arbor; ISO/IEC 17025-accredited, FDA-adapted methods) reads to parts per billion — about one second in 32 years. What they found:
| Product | Looked for | Found |
|---|---|---|
| Glass food containers | 30 PFAS compounds, including PFOA and PFOS | None detected |
| Stainless steel mixing bowls | Lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury | None detected |
| Stainless steel mixing bowls | BPA, BPS, BPF | None detected |
| Silicone utensils | BPA, BPS, BPF | None detected |
| Silicone utensils, 24-hour soak in food simulant | Lead, mercury | None detected |
| Silicone utensils, 24-hour soak in food simulant | Arsenic, cadmium | Passed |
| Silicone utensils | Germany's LFGB food-contact standard, 8 tests | 8 of 8 passed |
| 316 stainless French press, 24-hour soak in food simulant | Lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury | Passed |
Tests run March–September 2026. The acid soak is the stress from above: hot, acidic, long. Full certificates available on request.
Questions people ask
What do these chemicals actually do to you?
We only repeat what agencies put in writing. The WHO's cancer arm classifies PFOA as carcinogenic to humans, its highest category. Europe's food safety authority cut BPA's tolerable intake 20,000× over effects on the immune system. Germany's BfR: nylon oligomers damage the liver and thyroid at high doses in animal studies. Not headlines — regulators.
Do microplastics actually hurt anything?
Science is mid-answer — they've been found in blood, lungs and placentas, and what they do there is still being mapped. The sharpest data point so far: a 2024 New England Journal of Medicine study found that patients with microplastics in their artery plaque had about 4.5× the risk of heart attack, stroke or death over the next three years. An association, not proof of cause — the authors say so. Reason enough for us to keep them out of the soup.
If it's already in everyone, why bother?
Because levels drop when intake drops. After the US phased PFOS out of production, blood levels fell more than 85% over two decades (CDC). And your body clears BPA within hours — it shows up in 96% of people only because it comes back in every day. Close the tap and the level follows.
Is my kitchen really the biggest source?
Not always — water, packaging and dust all contribute, and you can't audit those. Your kitchen is different: it's where the hottest food meets materials you chose, three times a day. It's not the whole tap. It's the part with a handle.
Is "BPA-free" or "PFOA-free" enough?
It means one chemical was swapped, usually for a close relative — BPA for BPS or BPF, PFOA for other PFAS. The label tells you what's missing, not what the material sheds when it's scratched, heated, or parked in something acidic.
Change what touches food when it's hot.
You can't control the water main or the air. You control two square meters of counter. That's enough. Free shipping and free returns.
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