Fast Food Ecofollies

Food businesses are as eager as other corporations to display their ESG moonbattery. This has resulted in fast food ecofollies.

These companies sometimes signal their virtue by serving food in ostensibly envirofriendly molded fiber bowls:

Unlike styrofoam clamshells or wax-lined soup cups, fiber products feel like they’d turn into mush on a leaf pile. They seem to offer convenience without the karmic debt, a way to eat that leaves no trace.

How nice to be able to eat without guilt gnawing at us for violating the planet. But as usual with environmentalist virtue signaling, appearance is one thing, reality another:

[A]ll molded fiber bowls contain PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a broad class of more than 4,000 fluorinated compounds that do not biodegrade naturally in the environment. This means that the bowls used at restaurants like Chipotle and Sweetgreen aren’t truly compostable, as has been claimed. Instead, they are likely making compost more toxic, adding to the chemical load of the very soil and water they were supposed to help improve.

Nonetheless, Sweatgreen boasts that its molded fiber bowls are “100% compostable!”

Health effects at the individual level are still unknown:

The very worst PFAS chemicals are linked to a range of serious health outcomes, from colitis and thyroid disorders to kidney and testicular cancers, and have been mostly phased out of production in the U.S. These bowls are more likely to contain newer varieties that are just as persistent in the environment and are of grave concern to scientists, but have not been studied as closely for potential health effects.

Health effects on humans are of less concern to enviromoonbats than those on animals. For example, many tears have been shed over the fate of sea turtles that get plastic straws stuck in their nostrils. This is a major justification for the war on plastic straws (see here, here, here, here, and here).

MacDonald’s has responded with paper straws. These suck:

Last year, it axed plastic straws, even though they were recyclable, in all its UK branches as part of a green drive.

But the US fast food giant says the new paper straws are not yet easy to recycle and should be put into general waste.

Customers griped that the new straws dissolve before a drink can be finished. No doubt environmentalists regard this as a small price to pay to save the turtles. MacDonald’s responded with thicker paper straws that it has a hard time recycling.

It is likely that before long there will be no straws. They will go onto the long list of what moonbattery took away from us.

On tips from Steve S.

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