BPA-free Canned Tomatoes

One of the biggest bummers about becoming aware of the bisphenol-A (BPA) leaching out of plastic food containers and into our foods is realizing that all of our canned goods are sold in cans lined with BPA, too.

There aren’t that many canned goods that we keep in our house anyway… various types of plain organic beans, artichoke hearts, roasted green chiles, tuna, and of course, tomatoes.

I love to use canned tomatoes in my Glorious One-Pot Meals because unlike fresh tomatoes they are delicious regardless of the season, they can add something extra to a recipe that is different from using fresh tomatoes, and they come in convenient sizes that provide the perfect amounts of tomatoes I need for my cooking technique.

So it’s a huge bummer to know that there are BPAs in my canned tomatoes ready to enter into the bodies of my family and accumulate, waiting to wreak havoc with hormones, cancers, and other horrific health problems.

In the US, industry has been fighting a ban on using BPAs like the kinds they have implemented in Europe and Japan.

That’s why it’s such good news that Muir Glen, a General Mills subsidiary, announced it will begin to use BPA-free metal cans with its next harvest. General Mills is not revealing the material it will substitute for BPA, though of course, canning and canned goods existed long before BPA was invented so it is certainly possible to do without it.