Before BPA: Sustainable Food and Packaging History

Keeping food for lean times has been a human survival strategy for thousands of years. Even before the advent of farming and the intentional creation of surplus food, people in prepared salted, smoked, fermented and dried food to create sustainable communities during tough times.

In the late 1700s, the French armies were dying of malnutrition when they could not forage enough fresh food. Napoleon offered a prize for the invention of a new food preservation system, and by the early 1800s Nicolas Appert developed the art of canning. Initially, food was canned in glass jars with cork stoppers, but these were expensive to produce and bulky to transport. Over time, assembly lines developed to create metal cans, since these were easier to produce in bulk. With metal food containers came a quandary: some foods react with metal. Manufacturers painted food liners on the metal containers to protect both the food and the metal, and one component of these modern food liners was Bisphenol A or BPA.

In the 1930s, a study by Dodds and Lawson revealed that Bisphenol A had toxic properties. By the 1950s and 1960s, companies were enthusiastically using it on products to ensure that they could sustain the food supply. BPA or Bisphenol A is an endocrine-disrupting chemical that has a bad reputation. It's on your food and you may not even realize that it is there. While white coatings inside metal cans are a tip-off to the fact that the metal is coated, BPA can come in clear coatings as well. Currently, BPA in the top two percent of industrial chemicals created in the United States. In 2005, a study at the Center for Disease Control found BPA in 95 percent of a sample of 400 adults living in the United States.  BPA is linked to the presence of pre-cancerous cells, insulin resistance, and chromosome damage, among other health hazards. It sustains food, but does it promote sustainable human health? Not really.

While BPA-free liners are one way to improve the safety of our food while reducing the presence of unwanted chemicals, the old ways of food preservation are coming back into vogue. As more and more people become concerned about sustainable food, food miles and food safety, home preservation methods like canning in glass jars, fermenting, dehydrating, and freezing are making a comeback. While grow your own and buy local may not become the new normal altogether, this trend is an interesting return to a pre-industrial way of living. We have come full circle, gathering food from our community and preserving it in ways that we try to make safe for our family.