Toxic-smelling produce bags

Am I the only person who notices that many of the produce bags in supermarkets have a really bad chemical stink to them? I don’t see how such bags can be safe to come in contact with. They are clearly offgassing something strong and if the odor is that strong it must also get onto things which come into contact with it.

Yet these bags have been used for a long time and are still being used. If I were a multi-millionaire I would have an environmental lab run some GC/MS analyses to find out what’s going on.

As it stands however people just continue to use these bags and it makes me wonder.

Some stores have different bags available which don’t have the odor. They are the really thin, somewhat flimsier bags. What I do is sometimes double-up these thinner ones, which have no odor whatsoever, and use them for everything including bulk items like nuts and grains.

Today at one store however they only had the chemical stink bags so I found a paper bag and used those for my salad mix and bulk sprouted almonds.

Many people aren’t aware of it but we have an amazing thing built into us: Our noses can detect things down to levels of only a few parts-per-million. That is very high resolution. A similarly-sensitive device would probably be quite expensive. But we have it built into us but sadly many do not even recognize it.

Once I went on an interview for a room share and there was this woman living in her apartment looking for a roommate. I went and met her and she was bummed out because the neighbor above her was smoking and the residual amount of secondhand smoke that was somehow seeping down into her apartment bothered her to such an extent that she told me she was sleeping in her car. Yikes.

But that woman should have known that she could have easily used her built-in, ultra-high resolution gaseous chemical detector and located the source(s) of the leaks. All it would have required was a ladder and some diligence.

I would have started by sniffing around the most obvious places like ceiling light fixtures and electical outlets where gasses could potentially be leaking in and then break out judicious amounts of spackling or silicon sealant.

Maybe she didn’t think of it because we humans tend to think that crawling around and sniffing things is something that only dogs do. But seriously its really amazing how our bodies are.

Its been in the science news to over the past year or two about how some things like lung cancer can now be detected in the breath of someone. I think I did read that in one study they found that dogs could actually detect it. I wonder why humans couldn’t also? Maybe we can also detect an array of things about the state of a person (or place, or thing) based on odor?

Then again, it might be as difficult for a blocked person to detect healthy odors vs. unhealthy ones as it is to sense healthy tastes vs. unhealthy ones, hence the poor diets of so many and companies which profit by marketing foods geared towards unhealthy tastes.

(I guess today was a non-eventful day if I’m writing about the odor of produce bags LOL 🙂

sciencedaily.com: Food packaging chemicals may be harmful to human health over long term