Greening Your Kitchen: Buy BPA-Free Tomatoes, Beans, etc.
Buy your beans from Eden Organics, the only company that currently does not use BPA in the lining of its canned beans or chilis. Here is what they have to say about their cans:
“All 33 Eden Organic Beans including Chili, Rice & Beans, Refried, and Flavored, are cooked in steel cans coated with a baked on oleoresinous c-enamel that does not contain the endocrine disrupter chemical, bisphenol-A (BPA). Oleoresin is a non-toxic mixture of an oil and a resin extracted from various plants, such as pine or balsam fir. These cans cost 14% more than the industry standard cans that do contain BPA. The Ball Corporation tells us that Eden is the only U.S. food maker to date to use these BPA free cans and we have been since April 1999.”
However, Pomi uses Tetra Pak packaging for its tomato products and Tetra Pak does not include BPA. Pomi sells chopped and strained tomatoes as well as marinara sauce. Pomi’s tomatoes are packaged in Italy so the carbon footprint of these tomatoes is gonna be pretty big. The Tetra Pak packaging also looks to be unrecyclable – two strikes against it in my opinion. I guess we get to pick our poison on this one — planetary or personal…
If you’re not excited about the Pomi/Trader Joe’s tetra pak tomatoes, you can also limit your exposure to BPA somewhat by buying tomatoes/tomato sauce in glass jars. They are not BPA-free because BPA is used in the lining of the frikking jar lids, but given that the tomatoes or sauce are not that likely to touch the lid of the jar, my highly scientific guess is that tomatoes packed in glass jars are probably a lot healthier than canned tomatoes. There is one company, Bionaturae, that makes its glass jars without BPA in the lining of the lids. However, their lids are lined with a a PVC-based organosol lacquer and since PVC is another toxic chemical we are all supposed to avoid, this does not really inspire confidence. Makes me feel like lobbing rotten tomatoes…
Special thanks to Alicia at the Soft Landing for her great post on BPA-free tomatoes 
- Got BPA? Switch To Glass Storage Containers
- Say Buy-Bye To Bottled Water
- Which Brand of Milk Is Best?
- Forget Free-Range, Buy Pasture-Raised Eggs From a Local Farm
- No More Toxic Alphabet Soup For Me
View full post on The Garden of Eating – a sinfully good blog about food
Tagged with: Beans • BPAFree • etc. • Greening • Kitchen • Tomatoes
Filed under: Foodie Goodie
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Thank you very much for the info on BPA free packaging options. I am wondering about the Tetra Pak for tomatoes (Pomi), though. Looking at the inner layer of the Tetra Pak (the one that comes in contact with the tomatoes), it seems that it is a plastic film/foil. Is there any official information on whether and why that is an ok packaging option with regards to chemicals leaching into the acidic product? Thanks!
It seems like the best thing to do is to make our own chopped tomatoes from fresh tomatoes. That is what I am going to start doing.
Thank you for the information!
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~conten...
This is a website that says there is hydrochloric acid in PVC based organosol laquer. This is supposedly the chemical they use in the lids of the Bionaturae’s lid. Another website said there was chlorine in it…I guess pesticides may be better …scary!
Here is the reply when I asked bionaturae about the PVC
The lids of our jars do not contain BPA but they do contain a small
percentage of PVC in the round seal that you see on the inner surface of
the lid. This is used to secure the closure of the lid and at this time,
we have been unable to use a PVC-free compound, although we continue to
search for an alternative. We have found that all packaging materials
have a negative aspect, but we make our best efforts to determine which
is the less harmful.
In our unique manufacturing process, the tomatoes are pasteurized before
they are filled in the jar and without the lid. That means that when the
lid is adhered, the temperature has already cooled. It may be possible
for PVC to migrate into food by direct contact and at certain
temperatures, but we are far below these temperatures and there is no
contact of the tomatoes with the lid during our production cycle. We
have never found any level of PVC in the finished product. You must also
consider that the percentage of surface area of the lid compared to the
glass is very small and we therefore feel glass bottles are the purest
packaging. Other packaging options for tomatoes, mainly tin cans and
Tetrapak, are entirely lined with plastics that have direct contact with
a much higher percentage of the food.
Thank you for your interest in this very important issue.
Thank you for your interest in our products.
All the best,
bionaturae Customer Service Relations
info@bionaturae.com