BPA liners in cans at Trader Joe's

I use canned beans and tomatoes regularly in cooking, but have become increasingly concerned with the BPA liners. So I was researching which, if any, brands don't have the liners, and kept coming across claims that Trader Joe's didn't use BPA liners in their cans.

I really like Trader Joe's, have been shopping there for more than a decade, and buy almost all my canned pinto beans, black beans, garbanzo beans, canned tomatoes, and white beans there. For a while I relied on the second-hand reports, drifting along on the hope that the company didn't sell BPA-lined canned products.

The other day, I finally got around to asking them first-hand. I'll paste the important parts of the response below, but summarize by saying that, though some canned products (most notably the canned meats), don't have BPA liners, products like tomatoes and beans do.

What does that mean for my habits? Well, I now feel compelled to start using more dried beans. In his book How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman offers handy tips for speeding up the soaking/cooking dried beans process, so I'll probably check that out. He also recently wrote a NYT article singing the praises of reanimating your own garbanzos, which gives me more reason to make the switch.

As far as the canned tomatoes go, I've been slowly switching over to those in glass jars or those waxed cardboard packs (I've written to TJ's to see if they have any BPA in them-I'll post that response too). Right now it's a moot point because it's tomato season, but as summer fades, I'll be turning to preserved options again.

So here's the Trader Joe's response, received on September 25, 2008:

To be clear, we do have canned items with linings that contain BPA and in this way we are in the same position as all other retail grocers.
Canned items in our stores WITH BPA lining in the cans: beans, tomatoes, tomato sauce & paste, soups, chili, and stew. Canned items in our stores that DO NOT have BPA lining in the cans: seafood (tuna, salmon, herring, sardines, etc.), chicken, turkey & beef.

Bridging the gap between farm and table

Just finished this quick read about Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSAs) in the New York Times. The article, titled Cutting Out the Middlemen, Shoppers Buy a Slice of Farms, takes a look at the growing trend of people finding more direct relationships with their foods and farmers.

In early spring, I joined a CSA run by a farm based in Winters, California- about an hour and a half from where I live. Before joining, I'd "borrowed" my sisters farm box when she was away on vacation, just to try out the system.

I like it, but there is something overwhelming about being confronted with a large quantity of similar foods every week. For instance, at first, I was totally pumped about receiving a pound of zucchini and a pound of summer squash each week. I made summer vegetable latkes, grilled them, made my own veggie burgers, and more. But I'm running out of recipes. This is hardly an insurmountable obstacle, but it does require a slight rethinking about how to find recipes. I'm now more interested in the spate of farmers' market cookbooks that have come out in the last few years, those that offer many ideas for each produce type.

Really, I think this is going to take a concerted effort on my part to create my own personal seasonal cookbook. Which is an idea I really like. But liking and doing...well you know how that goes.

Our God-Given Right

OK, I know I am showing my elitist, blue-state bias even more than normal...but who ever said that we bloated, eco-centric, short-sighted Americans have a God-given right to drive our gas-guzzling monstrosities as much as we want...WITH THE CHEAPEST GAS POSSIBLE?? I was shocked by an internet chain letter thing I received recently with some boycott scheme to take the oil companies to task and force them to lower prices. My response was, lower gas prices are the last thing we need. Maybe through some sort of market perversion the true cost of gas is beginning to emerge. Markets don't price for externalities, but what if we did? How expensive would gas be per gallon if it took into account the beginnings of the partially climate-induced food shortages and resulting civil unrest that is already hitting parts of the emerging world? How many few cents extra would you put in to account for the disappearance of the polar bears? How about the many other species on the verge of extinction? Would that maybe dillute our desires to drive our SUVs hundreds of miles on a spur of the moment trip? Or how about the guy on NPR who was complaining that is was getting hard to fill up his Chevy Tahoe every day for his 80-mile round trip commute...

Wow--Canada likely to ban bisphenol-a as a toxin

Don't miss this article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/worldbusiness/16plastic.html

Bisphenol-a, which has been shown to disrupt the hormonal systems of animals, is present in most hard baby bottles, Nalgene bottles, the inside lining of almost all canned goods, and many other hard plastics. Go Canada! I wonder how long it will take for the U.S. to catch up?

Pending Nuptials

After working in the flower industry for many years I saw a lot of weddings, and after awhile they all started to look the same. After becoming engaged last year my finance and I decided that it was more important to have a wedding that reflected us and our values, and that we did not need to do what all the magazines were telling us. Part of not leaving our values in the wedding magazine was trying to have a low impact wedding. While we are not perfect we are doing several thing:

1. Organic and sustainable caterer.
2. Edible Favors: We made jam at the end of last summer from the fruit on the trees at Nathan's family's house.
3. No plastic bottles: Placerville has naturally clean and delicious water, so no need for bottle water.
4. No extra crap: We don't want to throw away a lot of stuff at the end of the night. We choose our location because it is meaningful to us and it is beautiful. We are not going to add very many embellishments to the decor. The embellishments we are adding can, for the most part, be resold or reused after the wedding.
5. I bought a sample dress: A brand new dress is not being manufactured for me.
6. Something old: I bought old bottles off of Ebay to use as vases. The table number frames also came from Ebay and were used in developing film.
7. Reuse: The bar and the road signs are being made out of wood that Nathan reclaimed from an old chicken coop.


The unexpected gift of trying to have less of an impact is that we are spending more time thinking about what is important to us and how should that come across at our wedding. Doing this has really made the wedding a process and not just a party.

Every act is a political act...

I was at the farmer's market on Tuesday and happened to read the sign that stated that buying directly from farmers increases their revenue by 40%. It really struck me how much impact we have collectively from so many decisions we make every day...whether we buy something in plastic or cardboard, whether the food is local or not, buying recycled toilet paper and office paper, whether something is made from the mega-corn business products, or not. These decisions go to the heart of not only our environment, but also to politics and big business. These small acts of defiance are a way to "just say no" to all the forces that are thinking of the world in the old terms--that resources and people are limitless, there for the taking, and that only the efficient exploitation of those resources count. It is kind of fun to think through the chain of events that we trigger when we open our wallets, and realize that there is power there. And if we know it, and can afford to, we must make those choices that make the most sense for our world because we aren't innocent bystanders in the give and take of the market. We are giving valuable input to the machine of business of where money is going, and what choices drive those spending decisions.

Now or later?

I just saw this Dallas Morning News article about the the dilemma American Airlines (and I'm sure other airlines as well) is currently working through about whether to replace its old planes with newer more efficient models or hold out a few more years for the next generation of efficiency.

The upcoming Boeing 787 (and the Airbus competitor, the A350XWB) is "a smaller wide-body aircraft that uses improved engines and lighter-weight composite material to save fuel." However, there's not yet a production timetable, which means that airlines such as American are just kind of dragging their feet, but with the second-oldest fleet among the big U.S. domestic carriers, decisions will have to be made soon.

The get-it-now-or-wait-for-higher-efficiency-models question isn't limited to large companies. I've been struggling with the same question whenever I think about bigger-ticket items such as solar panels. I've heard that the technology will improve by leaps and bounds in the next half decade.

If I started using solar panels now, I would be supporting the industry and I would be able to turn some of that sunshine that I can see out my window right now into energy. But then in a few years I'd be stuck with a relatively inefficient system and if I upgraded, would be creating more waste, and complicated waste at that. What to do, what to do?