BPA Free Packaging/Enviro Resp Products

Hi all,

This is a bit of a rant, so bear with me...

We try to buy ds foods with no/low added salt, sugar, preservatives, other additives. We also try to buy Australian made foods because we know the regulations here are better but also because of the whole "food miles" concept. Add to the mix I read recently on the Choice website that many canned goods are lined with a plastic that has BPA in it, and there is some toxic PVC softening chemical in some jar lids! So I make most food from scratch. My ethos is factory food = bad, but sometimes it can't be avoided, eg Tinned tomatoes are in lots of our curries and spag bol etc. And I've got a real bee in my bonnet now.

Tinned tomatoes - you would think hey, simple. But check the ingredients and many have sugar, salt, preservative, additive, blah blah. In fact most of the Aus made ones I pick up do, so I go against the Aus made ethos and buy the Italian ones. Buh bow, the ones I bought have the white plastic lining the cans.

So after trialing like 6 different brands of tinned tomato, I can't find one product that is...

Just tomatoes
Made in Aus
Not lined with BPA

We are seriously considering trying to grow all our tomatoes for next season (we have a small block so this would be hard, so far all I can grow is weeds and chilli) ;)

Sooooo

Would anyone else be interested in starting a thread of "safe" foods?

* No additives
* Safe packaging
* Made in Aus

It doesn't seem like it should be this hard? Anyone else with me?

Tish
xx

Hi Tish

I'm very interested in this. I also try to buy Australian to cut down on food miles. But my main concern is safe packaging. I am really concerned about BPA etc in tinned and jar foods. I tried to email Heinz to find out if there is BPA in their tinned baked beans (DS quite likes them), but they either didn't get the message or haven't bothered to respond.

I've pretty much cut out tinned tomatoes, and now just blend up roma tomatoes to use in sauces etc. But I am always forgetting to put beans on to soak, so I end up having to buy tins. I use a bit of jar pasta sauce too, to pad out my sauces and add flavour, so the toxic jar lid issue is a concern.

Is it just the plastic-lined tins that have the BPA? So you could tell by looking at the inside of the tin?

It would be great to have a thread listing safe and environmentally responsible foods.

Oh hun - if you can grow weeds you can grow tomatoes! :)

I was going to suggest growing your own or just buying fresh ones before I finished reading your post.

If you don't have the room to grow some buy some when they are in glut (about now in many places) when they are realyl cheap and bottle them.

Many people have lost the art of preserving but it is a lot of fun - and addictive - you just need ome space in the pantry.

Honeybee, here's the link to the choice article - I think you can tell by looking.

CHOICE looks at the safety of plastic containers.

I too use dried pulses mostly now, for the same reason. Glad to know I'm not the only one ;)

Muppity I've tried for a few years in a row to grow toms with no success really. I'd love to try preserving our own. At the moment I'm short on time and storage space though - but it is something I'd really like to do, maybe next season? In the mean time thanks for the faith in my gardening skills hehe. I think I need to join an Italian family for the short term tho ;)

i'm with you! i'd love a thread as a reference point for those things. i do refer to the ethical shopping list but sometimes it doesn't answer all my questions.

it's a new thing for me - isn't it weird how having a child makes you more concerned about what's in food, when we should be just as concerned about consuming those things ourselves!

muppity - preserving actually does sound like fun. i can definitely see myself making batches of tomatoes or something. that might have to be a project for me!

If it makes you feel better, the food miles in canned foods is higher than you think. Raw material is mined in WA or South America. It's then shipped to Asia to be pressed into sheets, back to Australia to be made into cans, and then on to to wherever whatever is being produced is canned.

So the food miles on a can of Italian tomatoes can actually be less that the coutn for an Aussie product. But, yeah, I agree, tomatoes are pretty easy, although possums can be an issue in Melbs.

Annoyingly, SPC goods are shipped from Shep to a logistics centre in Melbourne and then back to Coles in Shep for people to buy. Crazy isn't it?