https://us.peugeot-saveurs.com/en_us/inspiration/history/
The car business sold to Stellantis, but the lineage’s kaleidoscope of other enterprises apparently continues.
A good pepper grinder (and the Peugeot’s are top notch) is such an obviously valuable purchase. Lasts a decade and fresh pepper from a good grinder is much tastier. One of the best $35 to spend imo
Specifically: the grinder top is not mated with reverse threads. This means the act of grinding loosens the top. I have to stop and re-tighten quite frequently.
I suppose the design is perfect if you are left-handed ...
Your palm is meant to hold the nut in place. On the old ones the tightness of the nut was the control for fineness so it was necessary to hold it as you turned anyway. They moved that control to its own thing on the bottom a few decades ago (iirc) but kept the rest of it the same.
While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching.
Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders:
https://bazaaranatolia.com/products/turkish-grinder-pepper-m...
(No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal.
I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
Personally I would prioritize water filtering for PFAS over microplastics worries if you have limited budget to start changing consumption patterns.
3M and Dupont deserve the death penalty for it and should've been dissolved completely for crimes against humanity.
I switched to bamboo toothbrushes from plastic a while ago, before de-plasticizing was really a thing. Now I'm glad I did, because plastic bristles grinding against my teeth seems like an easy way for plastic to get inside my body. The bamboo toothbrushes are pretty nice too, the bristles are soft but firm, and the handle is made of bamboo too.
The simple wooden ones last a decade or longer and cost about 35 $/€/£
> After reading about micro plastics in the disposable salt and pepper grinders from the big box, stores broke down and bought these very nice all metal mechanism grinders.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/1liyril/after...
Personally I just dump kosher salt into a salt cellar and call it a day but I am sure there are plastic-free salt mills out there somewhere.
Krell or otherwise.
It also has the added advantage that I can go completely overboard on black pepper and I love it!
i like that too.
metal ones are also available in india, made of stainless steel and maybe other metals instead.
traditionally, people in india used a thick flat wide stone and a thick cylindrical stone grinder applied back and forth on top of the lower stone, to grind spices, onion, ginger, chilllies, turmeric, etc., into a paste or masala, which was then used in making curries, sambar, and other dishes.
> "A. When soft stone like sandstone was used for milling grain, as the ancient Egyptians often did, residue from millstones could cause a serious problem over a lifetime, said Dr. Robert K. Ritner, associate professor of Egyptology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Egyptian teeth have been well studied in mummies, and only the rare mummy had good teeth, said Dr. Ritner, who lectures on Egyptian medicine. ''They usually had heavy abrasion, and were sometimes so worn down at the crown that the pulp or even the root was exposed, which must have been horribly painful,'' he said. The Egyptians were obsessive about cleanliness, using a natural soda compound called natron for cleaning the mouth and sometimes a chewing reed to massage the teeth. They had few cavities, and the damage seen in studies pioneered by the English researcher F. Filce Leek almost certainly resulted from the residue of disintegrating millstones."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-mil...
[2] https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-whole-grains-damage-you...
https://www.natureloc.com/products/ammikallu-grinding-stone
also called aattukallu in tamil and iman dasta (iirc) in hindi or urdu, but searching for the latter only gave results for mortars and pestles, which are not the same thing as the one above, the ammikallu.
If the plastic particles are large enough, I assume we pass them.
The follow-up question you might want to ask though is: How often do you want to ask that question?
Yes, every tiny little bit is insignificant. That is true for most things, including actual direct poisons.
A better way to look at such discussions is not to assume that this very specific thing you are currently looking at is the one, only complete problem. Remember instead, in these posts we are looking at lots and lots and lots of tiny details, only a tiny part of the whole problem space.
Do you repeat that relevancy question for every single part? The answer, when you split the problem enough, is always "relevance is near zero".
That is the problem of our tiny brains not being able to comprehend the whole, requiring us to look at tiny parts one at a time. When you create the sum, or the integral, of a huge number of rounded-down zeroes you get zero, and now you have the wrong answer for the whole of the problem.
Even big problems consist of a huge number of tiny parts. Asking the summary question on each tiny part is not a good method.
Every tiny bit of plastic we find is exactly just that - one tiny piece of the big picture. By itself and alone it would be inconsequential. If it was just that one single source of plastic particles, we would not have this discussion. We are here, performing such research, having such discussions, because we have a very large number of such tiny pieces. The question of relevancy is for the whole. Whether this one particular piece of microplastic you ate today, which came from your plastic pepper mill, is the tipping point is not a useful or answerable question, it's all of them combined over time.
That linked StackExchange thread perfectly portrays why the site went down the drain.
>Maybe you'll ingest more microplastic on fish or proteins in higher food chain than grinders.
>If you drink tea you've got a lot more to worry about in terms of ingestion.
OK ... ?
>Your concern, although logically valid, is nearly impossible to regulate or even measure.
And yet, PlasticList is a thing.
>We're talking about amount that is, literally, microscopic.
Yeah Einstein, that's why they're called microplastics.
I am SO glad that place is extinct now.
We are doing it on purpose, eating plastic that is, the only question is why!
And to be fair, it's still fairly uncertain. We demonstrated endocrine problems with BPA, but aside from that microplastic consequences on health still seems uncertain. At best we're mostly doing the correlation/causation thing that leads people down a confusing path of cure-alls and snake oil.
If there was a smoking gun for the consequences of this in our day to day living, surely it would be regulated out of existence[1], but thus far that evidence doesn't exist.
[1] - ha ha, who am I kidding. In reality industry groups would muddy the waters, try to pretend it's "political", finance astroturfing groups, and soon enough a certain segment of society will be proudly clutching onto their microplastics, demanding higher dose services, and ascribing it with magical cure-all powers.
surely, it's not so sure, especially with the current administration reversing so many existing policies. for example, reversing the restriction of asbestos is currently in the works. so adding new regulations on plastics use seems like something that the current policy makers will absolutely not be considering. at this point, I would not be shocked if they said they were reversing the bans on lead in gasoline or paints
I really, really hoped you weren't being serious...
But https://web.archive.org/web/20250624143349/https://www.nytim...
I'd long since noted that as the jar emptied the grinders were increasingly ineffective. Thinking on why that might be ... I realised that this was because as you grind the pepper, you're also grinding plastic directly into your food.
There's surprisingly little discussion about this that I can find, though this 5 y.o. Stackexchange question addresses the concern:
<https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/103003/microplas...>
Seems to me that plastic grinders, whether disposable or sold as (apparently) durable products, are a class of products which simply shouldn't exist.
Searching, e.g., Walmart for "plastic grinders" turns up five listings presently, though it's not clear whether it's the body or the grinder itself which is plastic. In several cases it seems to be the latter.
<https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/plastic-grinders>
(Archive of current state: <https://archive.is/yIIX4>