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've lived in communism and it was exactly the same. Pollution beyond any reasonable levels, testing chemistry on products and people, rules and regulations coming from government and faceless bureaucrats... The result was the same, but instead of corporate greed the reason was lack of any interest and foresight.
Well regulated capitalism is probably best equipped to deal with such. Whether ours is well equipped to deal with this is another question.
But the thing is capitalism is a tremendously powerful machine, so it's really more dangerous than an unmotivated Polish bureaucrat. The Soviets may have drained the Aral sea but capitalism has poisoned the entire planet (with TEL even before PFAS).
I had the same thought about demineralised water, you can get more expensive models which remineralise the water after, but it looks like it's not actually that important health wise because you get the absolute vast majority of your minerals through food, not water. And remineralisation is mostly for taste rather than health. Though I don't find the demineralised water tastes bad, but if you're used to drinking hard water it might be different.
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 $/€/£
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.