The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Jane Muncke: "Perils of Plastic Packaging"

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

On this episode, toxicology scientist Dr. Jane Muncke joins Nate to discuss the current state of food production and the effects of ultra processed foods and their packaging on our health. Over the last century processed food has taken over our supermarkets and our diets, and at the same time the containers they're sold in have evolved as well - to be more eye-catching and keep food 'good' for longer. But what have we sacrificed in exchange for efficiency, ease, and convenience? How do the chemicals used in packaging and processing transfer into the food we eat and subsequently end up in our bodies? Will switching away from these toxic food practices require more local food supply chains - and correspondingly simpler diets and lifestyles? About Jane Muncke Jane Muncke holds a doctorate degree in environmental toxicology and a MSc in environmental science from the ETH Zurich. Since 2012 she has been working as Managing Director and Chief Scientific Officer at the charitable Food Packaging Forum Foundation (FPF) in Zurich, Switzerland. FPF is a research and science communication organization focusing on chemicals in all types of food contact materials. She is a full scientific member of the Society of Toxicology (SOT), the Society for Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology (SETAC), the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Endocrine Society. Since 2019, she has been an elected expert member of the Swiss Organic Farming Association Bio Suisse's committee on trade and processing where she contributes to further developing the standards for processing and packaging of organic food. She is a director of the FAN initiative, a collective of experts warning about resource overshoot, the polycrisis, and related societal collapse. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/I2-roqSWjFo  More info, and show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/104-jane-muncke 

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagan's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. I am pleased to welcome my friend Jane Munker to the podcast. Jane is the chiefs. scientific officer and managing director of the Food Packaging Forum in Zurich, Switzerland. Jane holds a doctorate degree in environmental toxicology and a master's in environmental science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. If you recall from a month or so ago, Jeremy Grantham on this show said that he believes toxics, especially endocrine disrupting chemicals, are a larger threat to humanity's future than climate change. Quite a big statement.

Jane and I unpack this as it pertains to food, how we heat our food, the chemicals in the plastics that are in the packaging in our food, fruits and vegetables that are sprayed, and how this story is still underground and is starting to percolate into more people's awareness. please welcome Jane Munker. Hi, Jane. Great to see you. Hi, Nate. Thanks for having me. How are you, my friend?

I'm good, I'm good. It's busy times, but I'm excited to chat with you today. So let's start at the top. If you include Jeremy Grantham, whose episode will be out, I think, next week or the week after, you will be my fifth guest on the program to talk about plastics. And their impact on humans and the natural world. That's a pretty large amount of coverage for this topic that a lot of people are unaware of. And you and I have a lot of colleagues and friends in common that are deeply, deeply concerned about not only climate change and biodiversity loss and those other things, but as plastic

pollution as one of the key environmental risks. Can you maybe start with your opinion on that, a big picture? Well, I mean, the way people are talking about plastics is almost as if it's the plan B for the fossil carbon industry. And what I learned from you, Nate, one of your, I believe it was frankly on the just stop oil, is that if we stop using fossil carbon as fuel and invest into expanding the use of plastics, it means that we will continue to pump fossil carbon from the ground. And the heavy fractions, which today are used as fuel, would be a waste product. So I'm sort of feeling that this whole investment into plastics is just an excuse to keep pumping fossil carbon from the ground and to keep using the fuel. Well, it's kind of, you know, a modern, much dirtier technologically intensive version of Native Americans killing a buffalo and using all the parts of it.

We are killing the barrels of oil plus other things with their burning just to use all of it. So it's like we're using all of the barrel of oil. But I think most people are less aware of the plastic pollution aspect. So maybe you could start by telling me what it is that you do professionally. And how did you first have an aha moment that plastics were a real issue and dedicated your career to this? So I'll start with that because that's maybe a fun story. So I was a PhD student working in an eco-toxicology. lab and my job was actually to set up a fish facility in our in our lab with zebrafish.

This is around the 2000s and zebrafish were at that time already being used in sort of developmental biology but not yet in eco-toxicology. And so my PhD was to look at using zebrafish for eco-toxicology. And I was the first PhD student. So I had the task of setting up this fish lab. And everywhere I looked, people were saying, oh, zebra fish, fantastic model organism, because they produce so many eggs and, you know, you can harvest eggs every day. They're a tropical fish so they don't kind of live by seasons. And my fish were not laying eggs. I kind of, I got desperate because it just didn't align with what everyone was saying about this animal, the species. And so we tried all kinds of things. And one of the things that we looked into,

were the aquaria that we were housing the fish in. We'd gotten those from a colleague in neuroscience who was using plastic, polycarbonate plastic mouse cages that he had converted into aquaria for these fish. And so I was thinking, you know, wait a sec, there's plastic in contact with my water and that the fish are swimming. And there's something leaching maybe out of the plastic that is preventing their fertility. And so I started this whole study into looking at the chemical used to make that plastic, which is B. Spenal A. You may have heard of that.

And yes, lo and behold, we found large levels of Bsphenol A in the water that our fish were swimming in. Beesfinal A is an endocrine disruptor, interacts with the hormone system. And so my hypothesis was that this B's fesfinal A from the plastic aquaria was preventing fertility. And I was about to publish my first paper on that when Fred from Sal, a good friend and colleague, actually published the very same paper looking at Beesfinal A in Mouth cages. So that was that. And later on it turned out it actually wasn't the Bsfinal A that prevented the fertility. It was something else.

But that was kind of my first contact with it. And from there, you are now doing what? So now I am the managing director of a foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, called the Food Packaging Forum. And the Food Packaging Forum, or FPF, as we lovingly call it, is a charitable organization that does science communication and scientific research, but desk-based scientific research. So I'm not in the lab anymore. I'm looking at the data and studies that others have published. and together with my fantastic colleagues here in the team, we're a team of eight. We do systematic reviews.

We've put together a whole bunch of resources that are all freely available to anyone. You can access them on our website. For example, we've got a database on chemicals and plastics, and more specifically chemicals in plastic packaging. So that's kind of the first publication we did back in 2019, I think, where we compiled this inventory of chemicals that are used or thought to be used to make plastic packaging. So assume that I know close to nothing about this topic, which is pretty close to the truth, what role does food packaging play in our modern lives?

So the way I look at food packaging is it's an enabler of globalized food systems. So a lot of the food we consume today is not grown in the communities where we live, right? More and more people live in urban environments and we shop in supermarkets. We don't have time to cook. So oftentimes we buy heavily processed foods, a lot of it, ultra-processed foods, as we call it. And the vector for getting these food stuffs onto our tables, is food packaging. Sometimes food packaging even is so advanced, so highly engineered that you just kind of

leave it in the package, you leave the food in the packaging, stick it in the oven, heat it up, and then you eat it directly from the packaging. So it's really a wonderful aid, a wonderful product to help us live our modern lives. I just, you know, you and I talk quite a bit. And so I'm going to I'm going to go on some tangents here. How much of that, I think I had, I think it was Robert Lustig on a podcast that said that part of the reason that preservatives and processed and ultra-processed food evolved was to get food across the country to where the people were from where it was grown. And I'm just wondering if in the last 50 years as human population has exploded, that we traded not in a planned sort of way, but just in an emergent short-term focus sort of way.

If we traded human health for efficiency of getting the food to where it needs to be. And at the time, the packaging, oh, we can create these packages from waste products of this oil that we're taking. Let's do that without thinking about the long term and, like you said, the eco-toxicology aspects of it. Is there a history there or what is your opinion? So I think it's really interesting to look at the history of food packaging. And, you know, before the mid-19th century, we have to go back quite. a quite a long way. The only way to preserve foods was either through like fermentation or drying or smoking or some some people bury stuff in the ground, you know, and so on.

My dog does that still. Yes. And I think in Sweden there's a type of fish that is very much sought after and that gets processed by burying it in the ground. But anyway, so we. So we. we as being, you know, humanity had to work with the sort of tools that nature offered us. And then mid-19th century, there was a breakthrough and it really was a disruption, a disruptive innovation, namely the invention of food packaging to preserve foodstuffs, fresh food stuffs. And that gave humanity a certain kind of independence of the natural harvesting season. you know and I believe that this development kind of also in a way enabled industrialization because then less people had to produce food more people could kind of rely on other people I never thought about it that way so food packaging is almost a stabilizer of intermittence so in addition we also need energy storage which I had a podcast guest on that but this is a subset of energy storage because food is

energy. So if we store it and we can eat it a month from now, that changes our whole society's makeup, yeah? Yeah, a month or three years, you know? So it kind of helped with this huge issue of food security also, because if you had a harvest that failed, then if you had stocks packaged appropriately, you could consume those and hope that next year's harvest would be better. But you said this discovery happened in the mid-19th. century that was before fossil fuels in a big way, wasn't it? Yeah, well, I'm not too certain what happened when, but it was part of the whole industrialization.

And it was Frenchman Nicola Aperre, who's kind of quoted as being the person who invented modern food packaging. But of course, at the time, you know, the function of food packaging really was to conserve food stuff, to store food stuff, prevent food waste, prevent pests from gas. getting in. And then gradually, as human society changed with industrialization, food packaging got new functions. For example, think of the iconic Coke bottles. Those kind of were used, the shape of that packaging was used for marketing. Or you got the function of preserving the crunchiness of biscuits and keeping the fizziness in your drink and so on. So really, the way that you're going to be it.

that packaging affects the quality and taste of your food. And in today's food system, where everything has to be, as you said, hyper-efficient and it's all lean production and at scale because that makes most sense economically, food packaging has to work in highly centralized food processing facilities. So the big food companies in the world, they produce, you know, two, three, different types of products, and they produce those in less than 20 maybe food processing centers for the global market, right? So it's all very efficient. Wait, there's 20 food processing centers in the whole world?

No, no, per brand. I'm thinking of, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say the name of this brand, but there's a very large Swiss food brand. We can guess. You don't have to say. It has less than 20. production centers globally for over 3,000 different products. And so you can imagine what the equipment, what the machines look like that put the food into the packaging. They're running 24-7, seven days a week.

They're shooting out products, you know, hundreds by the second. And those machines cost a lot of money. So you have to run them for, I don't know, 20 years maybe to, amortize them. And that's the key point. They only work with a very, very, very specific type of food packaging. And so that's really one of the big problems for these big food brands right now, because their packaging waste is found in the environment. You've got a whole bunch of NGOs that are doing these audits. And they sort of reports. And it's, I believe it's Coca-Cola. It's Nest there. And I'm not sure who's on number three, probably Pepsi or Unilever. One of those. Their products

or the packaging waste of their products are most frequently found in the environment. So they've got a huge image problem. And it's oftentimes plastic. They'd like to move away from plastic, but they can't because they've got this technological lock-in because of how their business models work. So we're going to talk about food packaging specifically, but can you just refresh my mind and that of the viewers? like what are the categories of environmental concern from plastic pollution?

Well, plastic pollution is of increasing environmental concern because it is persistent. Plastic is a synthetic man-made material that cannot be metabolized by nature. And so if plastic packaging becomes waste and then is not managed as waste but is littered in the environment, then it just accumulates there. And so since the 1970s, people like Charlie Moore and other scientists who've been going out to sea

have been reporting on this, that plastics are accumulating in the oceans, in the gyres. But there's also a couple of examples, sad examples, from remote islands like Midway Atoll, for example. There's these famous pictures of sea albatross that are found dead on the beaches there and their stomachs are full of plastics because they mistake the plastic for food. And I think that's the point that plastic is organic, chemically speaking. I mean, you know, it's made from fossil carbon.

Fossil carbon is basically converted algae, right? So you always say, how do you say it, the sunlight? Ancient sunlight. Ancient sunlight stored in plants, sunk to the ground, and then through various geological processes, changed into oil. And so the point is it's organic. And so these birds mistake it for food. And they're filling their stomachs with something that cannot be resorbed, that doesn't biodegrade, and then they eventually they die. And if I recall my factoids correctly, plastic on the earth now outweighs all living animals.

And at some point in the next 20 years, it will outweigh fish in the ocean at current pace. Yeah, there's some estimates like that out there that I've also heard of, yeah. So that's one thing. The birds and ocean creatures are consuming plastic and dying and getting. sick. But what are, just give me the real brief overview of some of the other categories of plastic concern. There's endocrine disruption, drops in sperm count. Yes. What are the broader categories? Yeah, well, I mean, plastics, as we said, are man-made synthetic materials and the feedstock to make them is the waste product of fossil carbon refinery for fuel. And,

this waste product kind of gave rise to this whole chemical industry. And plastics are incredibly useful. You know, I don't want to let there be any doubt about that, including for preserving food stuff. The problem with the material is that it's not inert. So that means that chemically it can interact with the environment it comes in contact with or with the food stuff in the case of food packaging. And we call that migraine.

So migration, chemical migration basically describes the transfer of chemicals from the packaging into the food stuff. And that happens for smaller molecules. I don't know how much chemistry you want to go into, but basically when you make plastics, you polymerize these molecules that we call monomeres. So this is these waste products of our refinery. there's small molecules and with a very clever, complex, aggressive chemical reaction, a chain reaction, we make big polymer molecules.

So that's up to 10,000 repeats of your monomer unit. It's one big molecule. And that's the polymer is what gives your plastic, it's moldability, because it's kind of, it's a big molecule. It moves slowly. It's waxy. And that gives you this formability, moldability, incredibly. useful property of plastics. Now, when you make plastics, you have the monomers, you have a couple of catalysts, and those chemicals are not pharmaceutically pure grade, right? So you buy whatever you

get on the market at a good price. And so maybe you've got 80, maybe 90% purity, and the other 10 or 20% is gunk. But that gunk will also be part of your chemical reaction. And, and that will also be present in your finished plastic. And so you actually have a lot of different chemicals that make up plastic. And this is what fascinates me about this topic. And it has for the last 16 years that I've been working on this. Even the people who manufacture plastics don't know the exact chemical composition of the finished material. And so we're putting this material in contact with food.

We know that its chemical constituents can transfer from packaging into food. But we don't know exactly what those chemicals. are. Is this, I mean, a lot of these chemicals are invisible. And if they're toxic or produce cancer or reduce sperm count or those sort of impacts, we don't know that for years or decades. So is this at root kind of a natural thing that humans would do because the cost is way in the future and someone else's problem and the profits are today? I guess so. I'm not an expert on those things, but I do have a hunch that that plays a role.

Yeah, I mean, you know, if we've optimized our economy in such a way that we look at the next quarter earnings, then who would care about what happens in 30 years' time? And I think speaking to the health impacts, it's very, very, very difficult to study the health impact of plastics and chemicals and plastics. For one, because of these low, long time spans from exposure to, you know, effect. Of course, it's not the only sort of chemical exposure that we have to deal with or our bodies have to deal with. But also, there's no control group.

You know, when you do these kinds of studies, like with smoking, for example, you know, back in the 1950s, it became clear that it was this doctor's study. The doctors who smoked had a higher risk for cardiovascular disease compared to the doctors who didn't smoke. So that kind of became clear. But find a control group in today's world of people who are not exposed to plastic chemicals. Right. It's not as easy to test as your fish in an aquarium because you might be exposed to chemical A because of your TV dinner, but then some people in the control group might be drinking from plastic bottles or whatever. So let's get into this on migration. So if you had to imagine the universe of problems that we have from plastics, what percentage of them would you attribute to food packaging versus other packaging, plasticizers and other things?

Yeah, so the data we have there, and this always surprises me as a natural scientist, the data we have are from the market. they're kind of self-reported, so that's very hard to have exact absolute numbers. So take this with a pinch of salt. But of the, I don't know, maybe it's 400 million tons of plastics that are being produced today or roughly around that, about 10 to 20% are for food packaging. So 40% of the overall plastic production is for packaging, we say, and about half of that is for food packaging. Okay.

And I know that, or it seems that in the entire world, Europe has taken the lead on these initiatives with glyphosate and with single-use plastics and all kinds of things. I'm going to get into specific policies, et cetera, but why do you think Europe is ahead of the rest of the world, including the U.S. on caring and researching and changing policies on plastics. So I think there's been a lot of movement here, grassroots movement. So I think the ban that we have on single-use plastics, that was thanks to really well-coordinated campaigning. But I have to say that the first country in the world that banned plastic bags was not in Europe.

It was Rwanda, actually in Africa. So I think shout out to my fellow Africans. I'm South African originally. So Europe often gets sort of, you know, touted with being very advanced on chemicals. And there is, I mean, there is a good reason for that. In 2020, we got the European chemical strategy for sustainability, which is a great document. It's really, I would say, addressing key issues. It talks about removing the most harmful chemicals from food contact materials, like we call food packaging.

The point is, you can have the greatest rules in the world. If you're not enforcing them, they're worth nothing. And I think that is the biggest challenge in Europe right now with food. packaging with food contact materials. There are progressive rules to a certain extent, but they are not being enforced. And so I don't feel that European citizens are better protected from these chemicals than people else were in the world, to be honest. I was in Europe earlier this year. I can't remember what city it was, but I went to a grocery store and they had two sections of fruit and vegetables. And one of the sections was wrapped in plastic.

and little protective things, and the other wasn't. So in the United States, you don't have that. It's all like one section. And also, what's the deal with like the shiny apples that, like, they're so, is there a film or is there some sort of treatment with that? Could you explain? Oh, I don't know, Nate. I mean, that sounds a lot like a Swiss supermarket that you're describing there.

Yeah, it's probably Switzerland. So the reason for some produce being wrapped in plastic is actually that that is organic produce. And in Switzerland, we have very strict rules on the pesticide content for organic foods. And so if you have a supermarket that sells both conventional or pesticide produce and organic produce, and you have supermarket staff or customers touching first the pesticide produce and then touching the organic, you get carryover, and then your organic produce would not comply anymore with the regulations. But what about the migration from the plastics? What if you had organic produce and you packaged it in plastics, would then there be,

I guess plastics are organic, as you said earlier? Yeah. Well, I mean, organic. But is there a migration is my question. Yeah. So maybe just to sort out the terms there, we're talking about organic chemistry, which is called organic chemistry because it's made through living organisms. So it's the algae that fixate the carbon from the atmosphere using the energy from the sun. Right. So they take inorganic carbon, CO2, use sunlight, energy, fixate that, turn it into their own little leaves or trunks or fruit or if it's algae into whatever the algae have cells. And so that's why it's called organic carbon.

Anything that's made from fossil carbon is organic chemistry for that reason. It's a miracle of photosynthesis, right? Organic farming is called organic farming because you use manure as a fertilizer. In conventional farming, you use. inorganic fertilizer, which is derived from the Harbour Bosch process that was developed in the early 19th century by German, German scientists. And there you use a lot of energy, fossil carbon energy, to fixate nitrogen from the atmosphere. So our atmosphere, the air that we breathe, consists mostly of nitrogen, right?

80% is nitrogen. And so you just basically suck the nitrogen out of the air. nitrogen is what plants need as a fertilizer. And so that's why conventional farming, industrialized farming today uses inorganic fertilizer, whereas biological, environmentally friendly, regenerative farming uses organic fertilizer. And so that's why it's called organic food. It's got nothing to do with organic chemistry. Very different concepts, very confusing.

So how does your refrigerator and pantry look? different than most people's. So maybe just to quickly go back to your question about the fruit and veg wrapped in plastic and the risk for migration. I think it's a really important question and that will also answer part of how my fridge and kitchen looks. So there's certain risk factors, we can call them, for increasing migration. And the most important one is heat.

So if you put hot food or beverage, into plastic, you get much fast and much higher migration. So fruit and vegetable is not hot, right? It's always at ambient temperatures, oftentimes refrigerated. So I'm not so concerned about that being a risk for migration. The next risk factor is long storage times. If you store something. Hold on. Back on the first risk factor. So a no-no would you should never heat food in plastic in the microwave. You should always put it in glass or something, yes? Yeah, exactly. So, So if you use a microwave, don't put plastic in there. I'm also, you know, now we get these Christmas markets here in Europe

and people love to have mulled wine or hot teas that they buy at the Christmas market. And oftentimes they come in these polystyrene cups and I always cringe when I see that. It's so bad for health because the migration is just so high. Polystyrene is contains carcinogens and contains endocrine disruptors. And if you put a hot beverage in there. So those are migrating from the cup into the hot beverage, into your stomach, into your bloodstream. Yes, exactly. Help me, because I remember reading this, and you and I are on a similar list serve, and there's just so much to read.

Of course, we can't keep up. But I read that recently people's blood is testing positive for plastics in the blood. So what's up with that? So that's the area of micro-nano plastic particles. So there's kind of these two different types of plastics contaminants that we are concerned about. One are simply the chemical constituents, which can migrate at high temperatures and a couple other factors that we can go into. And the other are micronana plastics that can be generated. For example, when you tear open food packaging or you unscrew a cap, but also from the environment you're sitting in, if you have a plastic material rug in your house or you have plastic clothing, you know, like a fleece and so on.

And the fibers, you can inhale those or they can get into your beverage and then you ingest them. So it's kind of two different things we're talking about there. So I know that there's no discrete answer to this, first of all, because. no one knows, and second of all, to know we would need decades of research. But can you speculate based on what you know that if someone regularly drinks hot beverages from a polystyrene cup, what might be the long-term health impacts of such a practice? Yeah, that's a tempting thing to answer, but I think it would be damaging to my reputation as a scientist. I mean, as I say, you know, there's some endocrine disrupting disrupting chemicals that we're concerned about present in polystyrene.

Andocrine disruptors interact with the endocrine system, the hormone system. And as you may know, the hormone system controls so many different functions of our bodies. It's not just reproductive functions. It's many, many, many other functions. And so if you have chemicals that can disrupt the hormone system, you can get lots of, and lots and lots of different kinds of effects, ranging from diabetes, obesity, cancers, infertility, other reproductive issues,

neurological effects, allergies, cancer, you know, cardiovascular disease, and so on and so forth. So not to put you on the spot, but take your scientist's hat off and put your human pattern recognition looking at all your research hat on, how many or what percentage of those things you just mentioned,

cardiovascular disease, diabetes, all the other things, do you suspect could be somewhat or a medium amount linked to plastics? I don't know, Nate. That's really hard. Anywhere from 10 to 50 percent. Yeah, definitely. I think even greater than 10 percent. I mean, we don't have the data to prove it, but that's my gut feeling.

Well, it's just like climate change. By the time we have data to absolutely prove, it's like, oh, 50 years ago, we shouldn't have used plastics to wrap our food. Yeah. Right? Well, I mean, I can tell you this. We know that all of these chronic diseases, these non-communicable diseases, are increasing globally. It's not just in Switzerland and in the U.S., but it's really globally. We know that chemicals can affect these diseases.

diseases. And we know that some of these chemicals leach from food packaging, they migrate. And so that's really an easy place to start. I think it's a huge, huge opportunity for prevention. I don't know how many cases exactly you would prevent. I hope someone can work that out. But I think it's something that should be looked into. And as well, I think we do need to have a much better understanding of what the chemicals actually are that transfer from food packaging into food. As I said before, even the companies that make these materials, the companies that put their foods into these materials, they don't know exactly what's migrating. And I find that morally really problematic, you know? I mean, they make a lot of money with these products and they're

kind of putting all the risk on the side of people who buy these products and who think that it's a good, healthy product. I probably have too many questions for you, Jane, that you don't know the answer to, but I'll ask them nonetheless. So there is research showing that the top social media CEOs and execs, like Facebook and others, don't allow their children to use social media on their iPhones. Do you think the plastic execs at DuPont and other places are, do their fridges and pantries look similar to yours? Or do they just eat the same way as everyone else does?

Probably. I mean, they also know the impacts of ultra-processed heavily plastic packaged foods. I hope for their own health sake that they are not consuming those foods, as no one should. And I think here's the other moral dilemma that these food companies, these business models, they have created a want for these products and they continue to create it with very clever marketing. And I'm very concerned about this marketing of food products because it kind of eats its way into people's subconscious and it affects the purchasing decisions that people make. And we often hear that, you know, we need people to be more responsible about what they consume and so on. And at the same time, we have all this marketing, continuous marketing, not only in social media.

and oftentimes also people's behavior is blamed for a lot of food waste. You know, they say, oh, yeah, we need more packaging to prevent food waste, and people shouldn't be throwing away so much food at home. But at the same time, then you're marketing like mega, super cheap deals, buy this pack of a hundred different cookie packs, you know, get it now. And then, of course, the stuff, you can't eat all of it, so you throw it away. So there's kind of an evil vicious circle going on there, which I'm very worried about. So getting back to the, we were talking about heating, food, and what were some of the other categories that you were going to?

So another risk for migration is long storage time. So if you have foodstuffs that you're storing over a long time, and that's especially the case for paper and cardboard food. You know, people often think paper, cardboard, it's got to be better than plastic. But I'm really concerned about migration of chemicals, especially if it's recycled paper and cardboard. Those you shouldn't store for, you know, like two, three years in your pantry packaged in paper or cardboard. It's better to, once you've bought them, put them into a glass container or a ceramic or stainless steel container. Here's another unanswerable question. If everyone in the world did what you just suggested, we wouldn't have enough glass, would we?

I don't think so, Nate. I think there's plenty of glass to go around. I mean, the benefit of glass is that it's truly circular as a material. You can recycle it if you have the collection and the sorting done well. if you have separate collection, I know in the US that's a challenge because you commingle, which means you throw all the materials

into the same bin and then the glass breaks and it contaminates the paper and so on. So commingling is not a good idea, but if you have separate collection of your materials, glass is very well recyclable. You need a lot of energy to melt glass, of course. So it's better to reuse it before you recycle it. I just, yeah, sometimes like,

Every Saturday I go to the dump here, and they have the cardboard bins and the plastic bins and then the garbage and then the metals. And it is just astronomical the amount of waste that we produce, me even. And I'm conscious of these issues. But living in the modern world and leading busy lives and going to the store and buying food, I mean, the consumers don't have the intelligent environmental eco-toxicology-approved options, right, unless they do a lot of work and pay a lot of money probably and spend a lot of time. Yeah, there's a really nice scientific publication that I like a lot by an Australian group where they looked at the drivers for single-use packaging, food packaging. And the drivers there are the foods, the big food business model, globalized business model, the supermarket business model, which is increasingly prevalent, and the lack of time that we are called consumers. I don't like that.

We're citizens. I don't either. I know. We're humans. Consumers have less time to peel potatoes and put them in the oven. and, you know, so because we're always running around and looking at social media, so we run out of time to eat real food, and we have to shop at supermarkets. Okay, so what are the other problems that food packaging oppose?

There's the storage, long-term storage, there's the migration that happens when heating, there's the damage to the landfills and the oceans where a lot of this waste ends up. Is there anything else? There's an interaction with the food, for example. So if you have food stuffs that are very acidic or have alcohol content, for example, that will lead to increased migration, fat content, of course. One of the properties of plastics is that it's what we call very lipophilic. So many of the constituents in plastic are really nicely dissolve in fat.

And so if you've got high fat content food, you can get a lot of migration. So the worst would probably be high fat content, high acidity and hot food stuff. There you really max out migration. So you wouldn't want to drink a hot buttered rum in a plastic cup? No, exactly. Mild wine or coffee even, you know. I mean, coffee where you put a bit of milk. Yeah, I don't.

So the Starbucks model is a problem. Of course. I mean, not only Starbucks, but other fast-served food restaurants that depend on single-use food marketing. So could, I mean, not to single out Starbucks, there's tons of similar companies, but from a science, put on your scientist hat again, could there ever begin to be a scientific study that would say, Let's look at this control group of people that drink their coffee out of ceramic or glass mugs versus these people that drink two Starbucks a day in the plastic cups that are heated and look at the chemical load that comes from that. Is that something that could be studied?

I think so. I mean, I think there's also a lot else to be said for having a ceramic mug and sitting down and having a conversation with a human being while you're enjoying your coffee. know, instead of grabbing at, dumping in your car, staring at social media while you go from A to B. Right. So there's multiple behavioral downsides of plastic because plastic impacts your health due to drop in sperm count, endocrine disrupting, disrupting, hormone, mimicking, all that stuff. But it also is part and parcel of the just-in-time frenetic culture. So using glass and ceramic, not so metaphorically, would be kind of like the slow food movement. Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, that's why I say plastic enables this overconsumptive lifestyle. We're overconsuming as human beings. We're overconsuming our resources. We're consuming more stuff than we need. Almost 40% of the global population today are overweight. weight. You've got more people that are overweight than people that are underweight. You've got more than 10% of people globally that are obese. 40% in the USA. It's globally. It's 39% obese in the US. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, not overweight. 39% 39. Something percent are obese. Yeah, it's not. And that,

we don't know if that's clearly that's due to many things, but it could. It could. be endocrine disrupting chemicals, changing our metabolism and other things. Yeah. So there's a fantastic book that came out earlier this year by Chris Fentallikin, British scientists, medical scientists, and it's called Ultra Process People. And he breaks down different reasons why people are over-consuming foods. And again, as you say, it's multifactorial. It's not the one single reason. It's the marketing. It's the ultra-processing. It's all the amalcifiers and things that you covered that nicely in the podcast with Robert Lustick. But I think what they're missing in that analysis is the role of not just food packaging,

but also the food processing equipment, because food processing equipment also oftentimes is made of plastic or it's got like lachers and varnishes. There's migration from the equipment to the food. There's migration from the equipment. So the more processed your food is, the more chemical, synthetic chemical contamination it will have. So some people that we know keep telling me that plastics

may be as big of a crisis for humanity in the future as climate change. What are your thoughts on that? Well, again, I mean, it's maybe almost academic to try and rank these. I do think that we have a huge health crisis. And I really believe people should have a healthy and happy life.

And if you're born with obesity and if you're born into a community where you can't get real food, where you just get, as Chris Fentelican says it, edible substances. He doesn't even call it food. You know, it really impacts your quality of life. And what I'm really worried about on a population level is that all of these people will not be contributing to our community of human beings that want to solve the climate crisis

and that want to solve all the other crisis. because they are too sick to contribute. You know, so it's kind of these aspects they reinforce themselves. And, you know, we haven't talked about impacts on the brain. I mean, that's also a huge concern. And we know that there are chemicals like perchlorate, which we know affect brain health. And they're legally used in food packaging.

It just, I can't get my head around this. I just find that really, really, really disturbing. or organophosphates, you know. Tell me what the impacts are on the brain. You mentioned some of the chemicals. What would be the impacts on the brain? Well, I mean, I'm not an expert on the brain impacts, but I think first and foremost, it's IQ loss.

So, you know, on an individual level, maybe that doesn't kind of have such a dramatic effect. But if you look at a population, a whole human population, that has two or three or four IQ points less than it should be having, that has a huge impact. That's going to impact our societal problem-solving capabilities. But it's also behavioral impacts. It's things like autism. It's things like ADHD.

It's all kinds of mental health issues, which we are seeing more and more of. So you've told me some stories where you've gone to some international. plastics, I don't know what they're called, the conventions or the UN meetings. And there's a real filibustering going on with the corporations and stuff. How are scientists that are studying hazardous chemicals and working in your field in nonprofit, pro-environment, pro-future in food packaging, how are they being excluded from joining the policy conversations that involve regulations on this stuff? I can tell you an anecdote that goes back eight years, 2015.

I was invited to an expert stakeholder group at the European Commission on food contact materials, and I'd be going there for a couple of years. And this was sort of around the time when the European Union was talking a lot about endocrine disruptors and B. Sphenol A repeatedly was an issue. And France at the time had banned Bsphenol A for use and food packaging, which was a really great progressive move. But it was in conflict, in legal conflict with the European Union, because the European Union actually has the authority over chemicals and food contact plastics. And so I had asked my contact at the European Commission,

if there would be providing an update on this BPA issue in the next stakeholder meeting. And then I got an answer, we've changed the rules for participation in this meeting and you no longer qualify, so you're not invited to come. And so what had happened was I'd booked, I took the plane to Brussels, I have to confess, and I'd booked kind of overlapping flights because you get cheaper deals then. So I'd booked a trip from Zurich to Brussels and then like four weeks later. So a return trip and then, you know, another flight from Brussels to Zurich and so. So in order to be able to go to Brussels the second time, I had to take that first flight to Brussels, right?

Otherwise I would have lost both tickets. So I thought, okay, I've got the invitation letter. I've got the plane ticket. I'll just go see what happens. So I got through security. I was a bit late because my plane had had a delay. So I got late to the meeting and I walked in the room. And immediately as I set foot in the meeting room,

someone from the commission got up and ran over to me and said, you are not welcome here. Leave. Please leave. I'm like, okay, well, you know, let's go outside and have a conversation. So I had a conversation with this person that I hadn't met before. And I showed her my invitation letter and I said, look, I have an invitation. I don't know why you're asking me to leave.

And then after arguing for a few minutes, she said, okay, I will let you back in the meeting room now because I don't have proof that you're not allowed to be here. And then she said, as we were walking back in, we don't want people making trouble from the back rows. I guess that simple question had, you know. Let me ask a follow-up to that. So if we might say that regulators aren't doing their jobs

because they're overly influenced by, industry, but what if limiting change on these issues so as not to cause a fuss from the back row and disturb key industrial interests is their job? What if that is the job of regulators in kind of a plastics version of the superorganism outsourcing our wisdom to the market? Because I know, at least in the United States, I have some friends of mine that have been toxic activists for debt. decades fighting regulations, and there's like almost nothing to show for it if you measure

the total tonnage of toxic chemicals being released. So what are your thoughts on there? And what is the potential for like real change on this issue, realistically? Yeah, I mean, that's a very deep philosophical question. I've asked myself that question as well. I think, I mean, I do want to defend the regulators a little bit. They have a hard job. In my understanding, their job is to look out for the citizens of the country where they are working because we pay their salaries, right, from our taxes. But at the same time, of course, and especially when it comes to food,

you don't want to risk any food shortages on the shelves. And there's the scientist, Fjian Switzerland, who does enforcement. he works or he used to work for the local food control authority. And he once said to me, if we would truly enforce the rules that we have on food packaging, we'd have to go to the supermarkets and clear out the shelves. It's so bad. And then, of course, you have a huge riot because people aren't eating, right? So it's difficult also for regulators because they've been allowing these products on the market for 40, 50 years now.

And then to stand up and say, you know what? actually there's a few problems and we haven't been noticing them. So now we have to change the whole system. That is face as well. So it's kind of complicated. So given that shortening global supply chains and relocalizing is something that I think is inevitable and is one of the implied themes of this channel, could we short circuit this problem by opting out of big industrial food?

How much of this could be solved by just shortening food supply chains and eating more local? I think part of the problem is that these ultra-processed foods are very cheap because they've been, they work in these highly efficient economic business models, you know. So there's an inequality issue at play here too. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's more than that. I mean, well, we say time is money, right? If you don't buy these pre-processed or ultra-processed foods, you need a lot of time to source your foods and to prepare them and to cook. And so it's almost a different lifestyle. I mean, you know, in my family, we love to cook. We

spend a lot of time cooking and, you know, enjoying meals together because for us, that's quality of life. but yeah for some people it's just easier to buy the deep frozen pizza and chuck it in the oven and you know do something else with the time then and they don't you know necessarily appreciate the value of cooking foods yourself so i think it's an economic issue it's a time issue it's also you know maybe an issue of being more humble with what you eat If you want to eat seasonal, locally grown foods in Switzerland in winter, you're eating potatoes and cabbage and, you know, some cheese, some dried meat. It's not a kind of rich variety of foods that you have and through the winter month. Well, I have to say this, and this is off topic, kind of, but when you stay at a hotel in Switzerland and maybe elsewhere, the breakfast buffets are unfreeking. believable relative to what you get staying at a hotel in America. You get these formed hash browns and a hard-boiled egg and a granola bar. In Switzerland, it's like nine kinds of cheeses and different types of mucely and all kinds of

organic yogurt and oh my God, it's so good. Well, thanks. Thanks for advertising for my country. Well, I mean, where does that come from? I mean, part of that's culture, but I think it's time is money. I mean, you stay at a Hampton Inn or a Ramada or a Holiday Inn Express, and it's just crap. And then you start your day off with this ultra-processed. We don't even have an option.

What would it take to just change the breakfast options at hotels? I mean, literally, what would it take? Would it take a subsidy from the government to give healthy options, or would it be a boycott by consumers to say, I don't want that crappy breakfast. I want a Swiss breakfast and I'm willing to pay $10 more for that. I mean, what would it take? Or would it take people getting sick and scientific reports coming out and saying this is due to alternate processed food and the migration from the plastics into the food that you're eating? I mean, you're having this conversation about breakfast with probably the worst possible person because I'm not a breakfast person. I often do intimate fasting in the

morning, so I skip that meal. But I do want to say this. In his book, the Alta Process People, Chris Fenthalicant gives this recommendation to start with your breakfast, because that's a meal that you can actually have control over. So don't have like this fancy cereal ultra-process stuff that colors your milk and funny colors. Eat Musli, yeah, Swiss invention. Have yogurt. That's what I eat when I have breakfast yogurt and fruit. I have started eating breakfast at 10 or 11 in the morning, so it's pseudo-intermittent fasting. And because of where I live and what I do, I often have eggs and potatoes because they're both from the farm here. Not always, but most days.

So, Jane, what coalitions and partnerships in your work at the Food Packaging Forum have you influenced or created? Anything that our viewers might be surprised at? So, yeah, we, I mean, mostly we work with academics, because, you know, for us, that's really important as part of our work to be very science-based. But we do have an ongoing collaboration with the Swiss Organic Farming Association, Beel Swiss, where we're working with them on their packaging recommendations. And there we've got, I can share that with you. We've got a sort of detailed risk framework for migration, which may be useful to some people. That's published in English. Another collaboration that we have is with the Understanding Packaging Scorecard Project.

And that's a tool, a freely available web-based tool where you can compare different packaging options for the food service industry. it's cafeterias, restaurants, and so on. It's not the retail industry. And you can compare them according to six different metrics. So it's chemicals, but it's also impact on climate. So CO2 emissions, CO2 footprint, fresh water use, and there's a couple others. And that is a collaboration where we work with big food service providers, big companies. You probably don't know them because they're not B2C brands.

but we've got Compass Group, which is the largest food service provider, operates cafeterias across the world, Sadexa, Aramark. And that collaboration was actually initiated by Google. So that's maybe quite interesting. And then the last one, which wasn't so much an active collaboration, but I know that we did inspire that work. In the U.S., there's an organization called, the Food Safety Alliance for packaging.

And that's big food brands like Nestle, for example, Mars Wrigley, a couple others. They put together a list of chemicals that they do not want to see in the packaging that they procure from their suppliers. And that's called the packaging stewardship considerations. And I do know that our work was really pivotal and informative for that. That's great. So when you say that you interact mostly with academic researchers and institutions,

would that be in the discipline or field of eco-toxicology? Is that what it's called? Yeah, so that's my background. But no, we really have very interdisciplinary interaction. So we work with economists as well. We work with public health experts. we work with people who are focused on obesity, nutrition.

So other than you, I don't know anyone that has that PhD background in eco-toxicology. Relative to 20 or 30 years ago, are there a lot more people studying that at universities today? I don't know, Nate, because I'm not really active in the academic

environment, but I do see younger colleagues coming to the conferences. So I guess it continues. needs to be a popular field. I mean, like all the environmental science disciplines, it's very interdisciplinary. I think people don't understand that, why, but it's, you know, the environmental problems that we're dealing with are very, very complex. And so environmental scientists often have a really good overview over many different areas,

but they often don't have sort of very in-depth, detailed expertise. So for me, my in-depth detailed expertise, of course, is chemicals and free contact materials, but I'm also trained to sort of at least superficially understand different disciplines. And so we're almost like translators or interpreters between the different disciplines. And we kind of take this role of enabling dialogue and collaboration between the disciplines, which I think is going to be increasingly important if we want to solve these environmental problems. I totally agree. So with global heating, with the exception of half of the United States population, most of the rest of the world now understands what is happening to the climate and why.

But there are very well funded and high paid organized communication efforts against that to. cast doubt, et cetera. Do you see that at all in plastics? Are there people saying, oh, plastics aren't a problem and you're a chicken little and I'm going to drink this glyphosate? And is it, is that happening in that arena as well or not? I don't know. Oh, yeah, big time, big time. You make it sound cute. It's actually really rather unpleasant to be at the receiving end of that kind of manufacturing of doubt. But it's part of my, it's part of my daily work, almost. So when I go to conferences, when I speak on panels, I always brace myself for that one question that will come and, you know, try and discredit me as a person or discredit my organization because of the funding that we get, the donations that we get. Or, you know, then there's this whole playbook of manufacturing doubt, you know, then they'll say, yeah, well, we know that also caffeine is an endocrine disruptor.

So why are you worried about these chemicals? and, you know, it's like the whole plethora of, it's very creative, originates from the tobacco industry. So some very clever public relations people came up with this, you know, doubt is your product slogan. And hence we call it manufacturing doubt. Because as you know, as a scientist, there's no such thing as absolute truth. You know, there's always that little, little,

tiny probability that it could be something else. And we saw that with climate change, you know, where 99.9% of scientists working on it with topical expertise said it's a real problem, we should do something. And then they found one or two crazy people who said, no, no, it's all good, don't worry about it. And it also has to do with media reporting, I think, unfortunately, because the media, they love stories and stories always have to have conflict. And so if you say, okay, all scientists agree, that's a boring story.

So you'll say most scientists agree, but some say, you know, and then people will kind of focus on that and just gives much more attention to people who should not be covered in the media. So what would be the steel man argument on the other side that say that would take the point that plastics are essential? They're not a problem at all to human health. could you easily debunk such a statement? Well, I think one of them, when it comes to food packaging, is food waste. You know, we need packaging to prevent food waste. And the prime example that I always get pested with are the cucumbers, fresh cucumbers in December when it's not cucumber season in Switzerland.

And they import them from Spain or even Morocco, even worse. And in order to prevent those cucumbers to waste before they get sold in the supermarket, you have to shrink wrap them in plastic, right? The point is making cucumbers in southern Europe or in northern Africa during our winter is not sustainable in any case. So that's a product we shouldn't be buying at all in the first place. The second point is we have all these subsidies into overproduction of foods. we don't need to overproduce foods.

We really don't. We shouldn't be subsidizing industrial agriculture that overproduces food crops. We shouldn't be having sales at supermarkets where people kind of get nudged in a bad way to overconsume buy more food than they actually need and want to eat. So once you've dealt with all of that, including the marketing, then let's talk about food waste. the necessity for food packaging. I actually like those English cucumbers that I hadn't thought about it till now, but they do come shrink-wrapped. I like the taste of those better than the other ones, but I shouldn't be buying those, right?

The ones in the plastic? Well, I mean, if you want to continue to feed the beast, you know, which is the unsustainable food production. No, no, no, I'm learning from you. I want to make changes. I just took that for granted, because I have a slight taste preference for those. I love them. But I have a large life ethic that if I stop and just think for a second, that life ethic outweighs my slight preference for the wrapped cucumbers. I think you should enjoy food by all means. I love eating. But I think ideally you will enjoy the food that is seasonal and locally grown and preferably organically grown. And if it's seasonal, you don't need to buy strength-wrapped food.

So building on that, before I ask you some questions that I know you listen to my podcast, so you may know what's coming. But what can viewers and listeners of this program do, in addition to eschewing the English wrapped cucumbers as conscious consumers to protect themselves in the absence of large systemic change and regulations and policy and rules, what can people do to eat healthier from the perspective of migration and other problems with packaging into their food? Yeah, I think the first thing that's easy, go into your kitchen, make sure you don't have black plastic cooking utensils.

Really? Yeah, I hate those. Get rid of those. You mean like a black plastic spatula. Yeah. I have one of those. Yeah, black plastic is terrible. Why?

Because they contain many known carcinogenic substances. And they're one of the products that are actually enforced in Europe. And oftentimes they don't make it through the enforcement. And let me guess why I have one and why other people use them because they're cheap. Yeah. But you just get a wooden one, you know, or use a stainless steel one. I mean, not if it's a hot hot soup because then you'll burn yourself, but wood is fine. I mean, use the black plastic one if it's not hot food, but I got rid of all of those.

And then just, you know, follow the rules, don't have hot, acidic, fatty food stuff in contact with plastic. We have a wooden chopping board at home. We have glass or stainless steel storage containers for the foods that we keep in the fridge. I heat foods, I don't have a microwave, I hate them in the saucepan on the stove. So, you know, I really try and minimize plastic and hot, fatty, acidic food stuff contact. And then I think other than that, don't drive yourself crazy of it. I think at a certain stage you have to just accept that it's something that, you know, you just have to a certain degree go with the flow.

And try and eat real food. Cook your own food. Buy ingredients from scratch and embrace making your own food. We just, you know what? We just got at home. My family eats a lot of ice cream. And I'm really worried about ice cream, which always comes in plastic packaging. It's got a lot of emulsifiers.

It's ultra-processed food. So we just got ourselves an Italian ice cream maker. So we make our own ice cream. And it tastes so much better. I think, I mean, this is like with everything else, you have to, and my coach is talking about the difference between productivity in my own life and awareness. And you just need to, with all these things, just have a little bit of a conscious reality check of your behaviors. Like after this call, I'm going to go look in the kitchen and see, just taking a census. Like, what is the plastic that I have here that I just blindly assumed was fine because it was sold to me?

Beyond plastic, you are a colleague of mine in looking at the broader meta-crisis. So broadening your plastic hat to being a human alive at this time hat, do you have any advice to listeners who are becoming aware? of climate, plastics, energy depletion, everything else? Well, I mean, I think it's a lot of the things that we've touched upon. It's really becoming a conscious, well, consumer. It is, again, that ugly word. But, yeah, in this case, it's fair.

You know, I think it really helps to understand that you get side effects if you try and cut corners somewhere. if like if it's too convenient if it's too cheap or whatever it's probably not going to be so good for your health and i think um yeah just you know be kind to yourself be kind to others socialize with good people um be careful of of you know what you eat in a sense of uh where does it come from how was it grown How was it process? How was a package? But also, who are you sharing your meals with? You know, I think those are all things that affect a good life. The answer in my case is most often of the time is my dogs.

Good. Great. Good company. They lick the plates afterwards, yes. So what about young humans? I know you have teenage children. How would you extend that advice to young humans who are listening to this? and thinking about their own future in this amazing and perilous time. I think, you know, we have a brain for a reason. And as much as I love all these digital tools and devices, I think you should actively use your own brain,

like learn how to read maps. You know, I love all these navigation tools and so on. But it's also helpful to not turn off your own brain as you're making your life easier with these digital. tools. And so learn how to cook, you know, something simple as that. Learn how to make a good meal from scratch that you don't get dependent on all these too good to be true products out there. Do stuff yourself, go out into nature, read, read as much as you can, have discussions with people that are smarter than you. But I find that very rewarding, talking to people like you and all

of our colleagues who I incredibly admire and actively reflect and learn to become critical thinkers. I think that's the most important because, you know, when I look at the future with AI and all these fake videos and images and so on, that really terrifies me. So I think that's really important to have a good common sense, like what actually is real, what's our metaphysical reality, you know, And what's the fake? What's the fake world? The metaverse. That's very good advice.

And I am not a good cook, but I can cook like three or maybe four things really well. And those things I know, but I should probably add. I can make a Thai curry. I can make spaghetti with mushroom and red sauce, mostly from the garden. I can make fried fish. And I make really good. browns with garlic and onions from the garden. Sounds delicious. I'm getting hungry.

I mean, one of the tricks for making sure your mental health is good is to challenge yourself. You have to challenge yourself. Don't get too comfortable. So maybe I'll send you a few recipes and then you can challenge yourself and add a few more dishes to your repertoire. Okay, good. Few more questions, Jane. Not to put you on the spot, but what do you care most about in the world? world. I care most about relationships. I think relationships are what make us human. I think relationships

are the most important thing for a functioning healthy society. And I think relationships are important to maintain a peaceful world, you know. So I think I'm incredibly blessed. I have such a wonderful family, my husband, my children, my dad who's still alive and kicking at 83, who's a great source of inspiration for me, but also my colleagues here at work, people like you in my wider network, I'm very, very grateful to have that. So I think people should invest more time in their relationships. I've never said it the way that you just said it. I just took it for granted, but you're absolutely right. Relationships are at the core, including our relationship with the natural world in our own individual ways.

I talk to my plants, you know. I love, I've got some plants that I've had for more than 20 years, pot plants that, yeah, anyway. Yeah. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your status or anything, what is one thing you would. do to improve our human predicament and planetary futures? I would have fully safe food packaging and food contact materials. So that means materials that do not contain known hazardous chemicals and that do not contain untested chemicals. Because for untested chemicals by logic, you can't say if they're harmful or not, you don't know. So if you take a precautionary approach to life, which I do, you would have to assume they're hazardous.

that's a bit boring maybe maybe a more creative answer would be i would make everyone go work uh in a field or in a garden at least one or two days a year to produce their own food just to get in contact with nature again and and to have an appreciation of how hard it is to to produce food but also how beautiful it is then to eat your own food and then after one or two days spent in the fields, they should go for one or two days to the food packaging factory and see how it all happens. Thank you very much for your time and your continued work on this. Jane, sorry, I missed you on my last trip, but we will definitely be in touch and thanks for all your work. Thank you so much, Nate, and thank you for all your work. I just admire what you do. It's great. Thanks.

If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit The Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.