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By the time I was 19 years old, I had quit college and was working a job thousands of miles from my family. With no money, my first Thanksgiving away from home promised to be a lonely one—until a local couple invited me to spend the holiday at their house with their extended family. They warned me, however, that this gathering would also include a ne’er-do-well cousin named Jeffrey. No one saw him the rest of the year, but he always came to Thanksgiving dinner and stirred up trouble with his controversial political opinions. Not having a dog in their fight—and, sentimentally, having a brother with the same name whom I missed a great deal—I accepted the invitation without reservation.

Sure enough, Jeffrey came ready to rumble. Provocative comments from the get-go led to disagreement and annoyance, and then to personal recrimination, shouting, and even angry tears by the end.

Your Thanksgiving probably won’t be that adversarial, but you might be feeling some apprehension if, as is so commonly the case, you have relatives and loved ones with whom you differ politically. A day set aside for us to count our blessings can easily be a tense ordeal, especially at a time of intense polarization in this country. Most likely, you would prefer to avoid a bitter argument. Besides the damage that can do to relationships, you might also have noticed that even if you’re well-informed and can squash someone with facts, you still don’t “win.” As the English poet Samuel Butler wrote in 1678, “He that complies against his will, / is of his own opinion still.”

Equally, you might come off a sharp exchange frustrated, feeling that you “lost.” An apt French expression—l’esprit de l’escalier, or “staircase wit”—captures the regret of realizing too late the smart, cutting thing you should have said at the time. But if you do find yourself wishing you had a better way of replying when you hear something you disagree with, you have another option: a response that doesn’t insult or harm, preserves your relations with a loved one, and has a prayer of having some effect on your interlocutor’s thinking. And social scientists might have just the key to what you’re looking for.

[Read: How Lincoln turned regional holidays into national celebrations]

To avoid an ugly confrontation, knowing how arguments start and then escalate is important. They generally follow a fairly simple formula. Each side makes a claim, followed by some statement of evidence. So, for example, someone at dinner might say, “Donald Trump was a great president [claim]. The economy was excellent under his leadership [evidence].” Your immediate response might be: “I disagree [claim]. We’ve had more economic growth under Joe Biden [evidence].” Although the claims on one side or both might be ill-founded and the evidence flimsy, this simple exchange seems harmless enough, and certainly shouldn’t spoil dinner. Yet it can still initiate a complex neurological response that is not only unproductive but actually destructive.

To begin with, as scientists showed in a series of experiments in 2021, when people disagree about politics, their brain reacts very differently from the way that it does when the people agree. People in agreement experience what is known as neural coupling, in which their brains mimic one another; this makes social harmony possible. But that occurs to a lesser extent when people disagree. The parts of the brain most active during a disagreement are those used not for social interaction but for high cognitive function. In other words, disagreements are perceived as a problem to solve, rather than as a pleasant conversation.

Next, your brain when disagreeing immediately begins to lose its ability to assess the strength of your opponent’s argument relative to your own. As scholars demonstrated in a 2020 article in Nature Neuroscience, when you hear an opinion that diverges from yours, your posterior medial prefrontal cortex, which is a part of your brain responsible for discriminating between strong and weak arguments, displays a reduced level of sensitivity. In other words, you’re smart when making your own argument, but instantly dumber when you hear your opponent’s.

If, at this point, the argument escalates, you are likely to experience emotional flooding, in which the amygdala hijacks your powers of reasoning with anger—about what an ignorant jackass your relative is. You may now assume that no area of agreement can exist between you, a belief that in experiments is associated with the escalation of conflicts. This is when “winning” an argument seems supremely important to you, much more so than harmony at your Thanksgiving dinner. You will now find yourself emotionally disconnected from your relative, and vice versa, each of you saying things that ruin the dinner and perhaps your relationship.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]

In the scenario described at the beginning, I witnessed a case study of the neurobiological algorithm. Days after the row, however, when everyone was in a cooler hedonic state, the couple who’d invited me reflected on the altercation. “You know, I don’t even really care what Jeffrey thinks,” remarked one of them. “But for some reason, I always take the bait.” This candid admission holds the key to a better Thanksgiving, if you expect a Jeffrey at your table.

1. Do a cost-benefit analysis in advance.
My friends recognized that the actual benefits of disputing with Jeffrey were nil—Who cares what he thinks?—but that the costs of an argument had been steep. Unfortunately, they did that analysis after the fact, as a postmortem tinged with regret. You can arrive at this wisdom beforehand by walking through two scenarios. In the first, you can have a meltdown, say a bunch of bitter things to show your Jeffrey how wrong he is, and then regret having lost your cool. In the second, you can incur a minor cost by disregarding Jeffrey’s objectionable opinions, move the conversation toward more pleasant topics, and then realize a substantial benefit. Go into dinner with this choice of scenarios in mind, and you will enjoy much better odds of rejecting the bait.

2. Be a social scientist.
I have conducted many studies of human behavior over the years. Never once have I been tempted to fill out one of my own surveys or participate in any of my experiments, because that would ruin the data and I wouldn’t learn anything. My objective as a researcher is to watch, listen, and learn. This also happens to be a useful mindset as you walk into Thanksgiving dinner. Now that you have read a brief social-scientific analysis of how arguments operate, think of your gathering as an opportunity to observe this fascinating phenomenon. Don’t contaminate the data by joining in an argument yourself; watch, listen, and learn. Not only will this practice save you a lot of grief, but the research also shows that when you are looking for mutual resolution of a dispute with someone, you can reduce the physiological hyperarousal you’d otherwise experience in the confrontation. The attitude of observation that you adopt might just calm others down too.

3. Don’t forget to be thankful.
My Harvard colleague Jennifer Lerner studies the effects of induced emotions on behavior—finding, for example, that sadness encourages smoking. In a recent study, she and her co-authors showed that induced gratitude—in common parlance, counting one’s blessings—made people in the study less likely to engage in risky acts. This made me wonder whether inducing gratitude might also reduce such destructive behavior as starting a fight at the Thanksgiving table. As Lerner confirmed in an email, her research has found that gratitude does in fact change how we perceive the world, and that one effect can be to make us more patient; that could include making us more tolerant, she posited, when we gather with family.

[From the January/February 2004 issue: The angry American]

You may be thinking that I haven’t offered the most obvious advice of all: Just don’t invite Jeffrey. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether excluding him from Thanksgiving is the right course of action—and that will involve weighing the strength of family ties against excluding a relative for being difficult or having what you consider to be obnoxious views.

But if what’s guiding your decision making is long experience of conflict at past Thanksgivings, you may perhaps need to consider an uncomfortable question: Is it possible that you are the combative, argumentative person in the situation? If the honest answer is that perhaps, yes, you have contributed to previous family rows, you can make a resolution: Don’t be a Jeffrey.

In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, some commentators have argued that Americans don’t believe that the Democratic Party shares their political priorities. According to a large survey we conducted immediately after the election, these critics are onto something. Americans overwhelmingly—but, it turns out, mistakenly—believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social issues than widely shared economic ones.

More in Common, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization we work for, asked a representative sample of 5,005 Americans to select the three issues that were most important to them. We then asked them to identify “which issues you think are most important to Democrats,” and the same about Republicans. We used broad category labels rather than asking specifically about, say, “Democratic voters” or “Republican candidates,” to capture general perceptions of each side. Then we compared these perceptions with reality.

Let’s start with reality. We found that Americans have clearly shared a top concern in 2024: the “cost of living/ inflation.” This was the No. 1 most chosen priority within every major demographic group, including men and women; Black, white, Latino, and Asian Americans; Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, Baby Boomer, and Silent Generation age groups; working-class, middle-class, and upper-class Americans; suburban, urban, and rural Americans; and Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Democratic respondents’ top priorities after inflation (40 percent) were health care and abortion (each at 29 percent), and the economy in general (24 percent). For Republicans, immigration came in second place (47 percent), followed by the economy in general (41 percent).

When it comes to how Republicans’ and Democrats’ priorities were perceived, however, we found a striking disparity: Americans across the political spectrum are much better at assessing what Republicans care about than what Democrats care about.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

When asked about Republicans’ priorities, all major groups, including Democrats and independents, correctly identified that either inflation or the economy was among Republicans’ top three priorities.

By contrast, every single demographic group thought Democrats’ top priority was abortion, overestimating the importance of this issue by an average of 20 percentage points. (This included Democrats themselves, suggesting that they are somewhat out of touch even with what their fellow partisans care about.) Meanwhile, respondents underestimated the extent to which Democrats prioritize inflation and the economy, ranking those items fourth and ninth on their list of priorities, respectively.

By far the most notable way that Democrats are misperceived relates to what our survey referred to as “LGBT/ transgender policy.” Although this was not a major priority for Democratic voters in reality—it ranked 14th—our survey respondents listed it as Democrats’ second-highest priority. This effect was especially dramatic among Republicans—56 percent listed the issue among Democrats’ top three priorities, compared with just 8 percent who listed inflation—but nearly every major demographic group made a version of the same mistake.

What explains why Democrats’ priorities were so badly misunderstood while Republicans’ were not? Our research suggests that one reason is the Democratic Party’s relationship with its left wing.

In 2018, More in Common conducted a study called “Hidden Tribes,” in which we identified clusters of like-minded Americans who share certain moral values and views on things such as parenting style. The study grouped them into seven distinct “tribes,” each with a different worldview and way of engaging with politics. It also showed that much of the national political conversation is driven by small, highly vocal camps on each side of the political divide: on the left, a group we called “Progressive Activists”; on the right, a group we called “Devoted Conservatives.”

Because these groups’ voices are heard more frequently in the national discourse, their views tend to be confused for those of their party overall. (Think, for example, of the profusion of social-media posts, op-eds, and news coverage about the idea of defunding or abolishing the police in the summer of 2020—a view that was never widely embraced even by the populations most affected by police violence.) This leads people to think that each party holds more extreme views than it really does. For instance, Democrats think Republicans are more likely than they actually are to deny that “racism is still a problem in America,” and Republicans think Democrats are more likely than they actually are to believe that “most police are bad people.”

Our data, however, suggest that Devoted Conservatives’ priorities are more aligned with those of the average Republican than Progressive Activists’ are with those of the average Democrat. For example, Progressive Activists are half as likely as the average Democrat to prioritize the economy and twice as likely to prioritize climate change. By contrast, the biggest difference between average Republicans and Devoted Conservatives is on the issue of immigration, but the discrepancy is much smaller: Devoted Conservatives rank it first and Republicans rank it second. This asymmetry makes the confusion between parties’ mainstreams and their more radical flanks costlier for Democratic politicians.

The outsize influence of Progressive Activists, however, does not fully account for the mismatch between perception and reality when it comes to Democrats’ views on transgender policy. Our survey found that even Progressive Activists listed the issue as their sixth-most-important priority. So the belief that transgender policy is Democrats’ second-highest priority must have other causes.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

One possibility is that Democratic advocacy groups are prominently pushing ideas that even their own most progressive voters are lukewarm about. Another is that Donald Trump’s campaign successfully linked Kamala Harris’s campaign with controversial transgender-policy stances. In a widely seen attack ad, a 2019 interview clip of Harris explaining her support for publicly funded sex-change surgeries for prisoners, including undocumented immigrants, was punctuated by a voiceover intoning that “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” In tests run by Harris’s main super PAC, 2.7 percent of voters shifted toward Trump after being shown the ad—a massive result. The constant reinforcement of the link between Harris and this policy, coupled with Harris’s apparent inability or unwillingness to publicly distance herself from it, likely reinforced Americans’ association of trans issues with Democrats.

If elections are battles of perceptions, our data suggest that this was a battle Democrats lost in 2024. Despite the Harris campaign spending almost half a billion dollars more than the Trump campaign, Trump appears to have been more effective at defining Democrats’ priorities to the American public. Caught between their leftmost flank and their opponents’ attacks, Democrats were unable to convince the American electorate that they shared voters’ concerns. If the party wants to gain ground in future elections, it will need to solve this perception problem.

By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings. Stewart’s meticulous guides to domestic life ended up filling a maternal vacuum for many of her fans, and she inspired both devotion and envy. Oprah Winfrey, no stranger to hard work herself, once summed up the ire that many people felt about Stewart: “Who has the time for all of this? For every woman who makes a complicated gingerbread house, a million don’t even have the time to bake a cookie.”

At a moment when American women were already feeling the exhaustion of the second shift, Stewart seemed to suggest that they toil overtime to beautify their second work environment too. But despite being most famous as a homemaker, an occupation usually associated with mothers, Stewart would later appear ambivalent about motherhood itself. Before her daughter was born, when Stewart was 24, “I thought it was a natural thing,” she says in Martha, a new Netflix documentary about her life and career. “It turns out it’s not at all natural to be a mother.”

Early in the documentary, an off-camera speaker—Stewart is the only on-camera interviewee—refers to her as “the original influencer.” The label emphasizes how she shaped domestic life and purchasing trends decades before the advent of Instagram or TikTok; as one friend says, Stewart “was the first woman that saw the marketability of her personal life.” Archival images of a young Stewart exude the charming, homespun domesticity that many social-media creators now emulate. We see Stewart stooped low in her gardens, then feeding chickens in her “palais du poulet”—the French name she gave her coop (“palace of the chicken”). That visual would be right at home on the vision boards of modern influencers who broadcast their nostalgic visions of Americana to millions of followers.

But Stewart’s words, whether spoken directly to the camera or read from private letters, tell a story that diverges from tidy fantasies. Part of why Martha raises such interesting questions about motherhood, family life, and domestic labor is Stewart’s apparent doubts about the value of all three. Throughout the documentary, she seems to be confronting her own conflicting beliefs, but clearly, business—not the art of homemaking—has been the essential pursuit of Stewart’s life. And her single-minded focus on expanding her empire is what ultimately attracted the most criticism as she transformed into a gargantuan brand.

In 1987, the same year that Stewart published Weddings, a glossy guide about how to host the perfect matrimonial celebration, she and her husband separated after he had an affair with a younger woman. While Stewart promoted a book about celebrating love, she wrestled with her family’s private dysfunction—and when rumors of the affair became public, Stewart worried about the professional implications of her husband appearing absent from her carefully curated life. At one point in the film, Stewart advises young wives on how to react to their husband’s philandering: “Look at him, [say] ‘He’s a piece of shit,’ and get out of it. Get out of that marriage,” she says defiantly, cautioning today’s women not to stay, like she did, and try to work things out. (The two divorced a few years later, in 1990.)

Only when the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, asks about an affair that she had earlier in the marriage does Stewart concede her own actions. “It was just nothing,” she says, before decrying the messiness of divorce. “I would never have broken up a marriage for it.” It’s one thing to cheat in private, in other words, but she frowns at the public spectacle of dissolving a family unit. The moment draws attention to how tightly Stewart has attempted to control her image—and underscores how much she appears to resent the ways her accomplishments (and her misdeeds) have been judged in relation to her gender. In 1999, Stewart, then the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, became the first female self-made billionaire in the United States. The following year, Joan Didion wrote in a New Yorker essay that the “dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Nearly 25 years later, Martha makes the case that Stewart was subject to different rules than her male counterparts because she disturbed conventional views of women in the corporate world. “She was ruthless,” one commentator says. “In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man. But, you know, for a woman—you know, she was a bitch.” That may be an interesting place to begin a look back at a controversial mogul, but the documentary is light on specifics about Stewart’s perceived professional shortcomings, which have included criticism that she underpaid her staff while earning millions, berated them, and sold their work as her own. Instead, we get the vague sense that some people thought she was harsh and that others found her to be an exacting perfectionist. But unlike an earlier CNN docuseries on Stewart, Martha shies away from interrogating the details of such workplace accusations in favor of rehashing how multiple powerful men underestimated or outright disliked her.

[Read: Martha Stewart must know something we don’t]

The back half of the film brings the same gender-based analysis to Stewart’s infamous 2004 trial, which began with the FBI—led by a young, ambitious James Comey—implicating Stewart in a larger insider-trading scandal. When the agency failed to indict Stewart for illegal trading, it pursued a case against her for lying to the authorities during the investigation. In the end, Stewart served five months in prison after being found guilty of charges including obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Martha presents the case as one more example of the vitriol that Stewart had long endured. To her critics, Stewart’s case punctured the veneer of her propriety; even though her prison sentence had nothing to do with her corporation, it suggested an untoward explanation for her lifestyle company’s success, one that made Stewart’s relentless drive even more unpalatable. “I’m strict and I’m demanding and I’m all those good things that make a successful person,” Stewart says in an archival clip from around the time she was sentenced.

A more nuanced view does emerge in the documentary, which later addresses how Stewart changed while serving her sentence. Her time in a West Virginia prison prompted a serious reconsideration of her enterprise—and what kinds of homes it reflected. Stewart encountered incarcerated women who’d faced much harsher realities but also wanted to turn their varied talents into viable business ventures. Hearing the other women’s stories and looking over their business plans when they sought her advice made the experience bearable for Stewart—and partially recalibrated her approach to her own work. The homecoming speech she delivered to her staff shortly after being released focused heavily on shifting the why of their work. “I sense in the American public there is a growing need to preserve human connections,” Stewart said then, adding that she had come to understand “the need to honor many, many kinds of families.”

Nearly a decade after Stewart left prison wearing a poncho crocheted by a fellow inmate, the rise of girlboss feminism popularized a style of brash, demanding leadership that Stewart embodied before her conviction. Girlboss feminism has since fallen out of favor in the corporate world, but today’s lifestyle influencers, even those who espouse traditional values, are more emboldened to openly discuss the profit-making motive of their work—especially if they look the part of the doting maternal figure. Where Stewart often succeeded in branding herself as a businesswoman before a mother, many of the most popular homemaking-content creators seem to grasp that their children are the most important emblems of the hyper-feminine fantasy they’re putting on display. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert recently wrote in an essay about a new Hulu reality series following TikTok-famous Mormon women, “the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority.”

These women’s popularity—and, in some cases, their families’ economic viability—is inextricably tied to how they perform sacrificial motherhood, a role that Stewart never appeared interested in. But even though the business of domesticity has shifted in the years since Stewart’s IPO, her earlier successes unquestionably primed audiences for the advent of homemaking influencers whose approach to their public image differs radically from her own. Stewart laid a foundation for an entire genre of creators who generate income by giving followers a glimpse into their kitchen—not just with her recipes but with her sheer dedication to building a brand and her unwillingness to render her labor invisible. For all the controversies Stewart has weathered, she’s always seemed to project authority because she knows what she’s doing—and she’s always behaved as though everyone would be better off heeding the boss’s advice.

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We warned you last month to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula.” In a recent study conducted about consumer products, researchers concluded kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants, which you do not want anywhere near your hot food. After the article was published, its author received reports, possibly exaggerated, of people in Burlington, Vermont, throwing their black plastic spatulas out en masse. You should too.

That article was just the appetizer. This episode of Radio Atlantic is the entire meal, coming to you in time for Thanksgiving. We talk to its author, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, about every other plastic thing in your kitchen: cutting boards, nonstick pans, plastic wrap, slow cookers, sippy cups. Read it before you cook. And prepare to hassle your plastic-loving hosts. Politely.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Well, it’s Thanksgiving—the day on the American calendar centered most around food, when we gather together to cook for our families and friends. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about our kitchens and the things in them that we should maybe be worrying about.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, we’re here to ruin your Thanksgiving. A little bit. Just kidding. Mostly.

What I’m talking about is an Atlantic story from a few weeks ago that hit a nerve with people.

The headline of that story was, “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula,” and I’m joined in the studio by the author of that story, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, who writes about science and the environment. Hi, Zoë.

Zoë Schlanger: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: Um, I have a black plastic spatula.

Schlanger: Oh no.

Rosin: I do. I’ve been using it for so many years that I can’t—you know what, Zoë? I have two black plastic spatulas.

Schlanger: Because the first one started melting?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Because the first one just ate into my brain, and I didn’t—

Schlanger: It told you to acquire a second.

Rosin: It told me to acquire a second. Exactly.

So, okay. You said the black plastic utensils are “probably leaching chemicals” into our cooking, and I want to understand why. But I will say that your story opened up a whole bunch of worries besides the spatula that I want to run by you, not just for me, but for a lot of my friends. And I’m sure that happened to you as well.

Schlanger: Oh yes.

Rosin: Yeah. Were a lot of people writing you?

Schlanger: Everyone was texting me. Someone texted me that the entire town of Burlington, Vermont, was throwing their spatulas out the window at the same time.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You know what? I absolutely believe that. That’s an incredible image. Were people texting you like, What about this? And what about that? And what about this other thing?

Schlanger: Absolutely. There’s a lot of discussion about how to tell silicone apart from plastic, whether different color plastic was okay, which, like—spoiler alert—probably not, but black is worse.

Rosin: I feel like what’s going to happen on Thanksgiving—sorry, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. We really do wish you the best and most peaceful Thanksgiving. People are going to be sneaking into—if they’re not the cooks, they’re going to be sneaking into the kitchen of whoever is cooking and, like, monitoring their kitchen utensils and implements just in case.

Schlanger: I love that.

Rosin: Anyway, it’s better than political arguments, so it’s not so bad.

Okay, let’s start with what you wrote about. Why should I throw out my black plastic spatula? Which by the way, I haven’t done. It’s only because you’re here with me in person in the studio.

Schlanger: So I have to convince you?

Rosin: You have to convince me face-to-face because it sounds like other people you know have thrown theirs out, but I haven’t.

Schlanger: So the reason black plastic spatulas are particularly concerning, and I will caveat this by saying you should really throw out any plastic spatula you have of any color, but black plastic has this particularly noxious place in our product stream because it can’t be fully recycled.

Recycling plants just ignore black plastic. They can’t really see the plastic that’s black, because they use optical sensors. So that means, instead of coming from a clean recycling stream, some black plastic products seem to be made out of dubious recycled products, particularly e-waste—electronic waste—often abroad with very little oversight.

And electronics are imbued, often, with flame retardants. So we’re talking about, like, the black plastic housing on your computer monitor or your cell phone or your keyboard. Those can all have flame retardants in them to keep them from catching fire. And flame retardants are associated with a huge range of health hazards, from cancer, diabetes, thyroid issues.

And then they may end up remolded into implements that are touching your food, which they were never meant to be part of. And then you use those implements with heat and oil, which are all things that encourage these compounds in the plastic to migrate out of the object. And then you just eat a lot more of those gross things.

Rosin: Wow. That was a lot. I’m going to slow that down, so I understand. Okay, there are so many facts I learned there. I just want to make sure I learned them correctly. Black plastic is probably recycled from electronics?

Schlanger: Right. Not all of it is. Certainly there could be new, pure black plastic that is not coming from recycled e-waste, but there’s no way to tell.

Rosin: Now, regular plastic in a recycling facility gets rid of these toxins—is that what happens? Like, it can notice them and get rid of them, but in black plastic it just can’t be treated properly?

Schlanger: No, actually. There’s lots of toxins in all recycled plastic, but we’re mostly just talking about flame retardants here. And in the U.S. and in lots of other places, there are laws against or rules against combining electronic waste with the general-consumer recycling flow. So really, these flame retardants are never supposed to get into your consumer products, but they are.

Rosin: Okay, so that’s the black plastic. It can have flame retardants in it. It might come from e-waste. What about gray, white, red—all the other color spatulas? I do have two black ones and one gray one. So what about those?

Schlanger: Why plastic, though? It’s just, it’s—well, first of all, from a purely utilitarian perspective, plastic’s just a terrible thing to use when you’re dealing with a hot pan.

I mean, the thing melts. It’s just not a very durable product. But plastic of all colors probably has stuff in it that you don’t really want interacting with your food. I mean, at the very bottom of this long list is microplastics. If you have a piece of plastic that you’re using regularly in the kitchen, it’s sloughing off microplastics into your food.

Rosin: No matter what? This is nothing to do with heat. It’s just giving off little flakes?

Schlanger: It’s, like, use.

Rosin: Dandruff—just like plastic dandruff is coming off.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) Exactly like dandruff. I mean, one thing I also noticed in people’s kitchens is how common a plastic cutting board is. And that’s just you slicing chunks of plastic into your tomatoes every single time. And I get why people have it. It’s easier to make it sanitary, and they wash quite well. But it’s just not worth it. You can use anything else.

The other problem with most plastics is that there are other molecules in that material—in that base polymer—that are added there to make the plastic flexible or make it really thin, and those things are broadly called “plasticizers.”

They include things you might have heard of, like phthalates, that have also been associated with lots of harmful health outcomes. Basically, there’s no good plastic, particularly not in your kitchen.

Rosin: Okay, so no cutting boards. I’m not going to give you “no good plastics” yet. I have to go through it a little slowly. What about storage containers? Like, I have just a million plastic storage containers.

Schlanger: Can you tell me more about them? Are they hard and sturdy, or are they like what you got your takeout in, like, seven months ago, and you’re still using them?

Rosin: Both? (Laughs.) Both. I have a couple of these very hard ones with the click-in tops, but then those get lost because those are the most used. So they end up in my kid’s backpack, and they end up at school. And so then we just revert to the 3,000 takeout containers that we have sitting around.

I can already see—I already feel bad. Okay. What’s coming?

Schlanger: I mean, I get it. It’s like, there’s so much convenience to this. So typically, my understanding is—one rule of thumb is that harder, sturdier plastic is maybe shedding fewer phthalates than the very flexible ones, but they could be shedding other compounds of concern.

And the thing about containers is that if you’re putting something in that container that is fatty—if it has an oil, an animal fat, anything like that—lipids encourage these compounds to migrate out of the plastic and into the food. These plasticizers I was talking about are lipophilic, meaning they easily transfer when in contact with fats. So we’re often putting our leftovers in these bins, and, almost always, those have some kind of fat. And then it also depends if you’re heating things in that plastic. Heat is something that degrades plastic quite readily.

(Laughs.) I see you smirking and—

Rosin: —I am going to confess something now. This is what I think happens to most of us: We know, and we don’t know. So we sort of know what you said, and then it goes into a short-term memory hole.

So what I know and don’t know is that my son loves leftovers. He loves leftovers. Like, he’ll take it over anything for lunch the next day. Of course he microwaves it. Like, of course he puts it in the takeout container, takes it to school, and then microwaves it. That’s like a perfect storm, right?

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s not the best. It’s great that he is eating leftovers. We don’t like food waste either.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Schlanger: Yeah. Microwaving plastic is one of those ones that I just don’t do anymore.

So heat degrades plastic. Cold—my understanding is that cold actually makes plastic a bit more chemically stable, at least in the short term. But then, I have seen at least one paper that found that the cycle of heating and freezing, if you use the same container to do both many times, will also enhance degradation and also enhance those plasticizers leaching out.

And that was a study that was looking at, actually, farmers. They put these big plastic tarps over their fields to suppress weeds, and those get heated and frozen over and over again. So I assume you could apply that to consumer plastic goods too. It’s all polymers. It’s all the same base material, but that was done in farm fields.

Rosin: Interesting. So is where we’ve landed with plastic, no plastic at all? Or, Use the hardest plastic you can find? Like, what about those very sturdy plastic containers, or are we just going for Pyrex glass?

Schlanger: I have now transitioned entirely to glass in my own kitchen. And I think that that’s more of a risk-tolerance thing. We all do things that will slowly kill us, and it’s sort of choosing which things those are. I mean, we’re bombarded by problematic compounds in every aspect of our life, and you cannot eliminate them all. So if you want to use your sturdy plastic containers to store fat-neutral things, like crackers, that’s probably fine.

Rosin: I think what you’re saying is that I should send my son to school with his leftovers in a glass Pyrex container.

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s heavier, which is a pain, but I’m saying yes, definitely.

Rosin: You’re saying yes.

Schlanger: And I don’t know how old your kids are, but some of these things matter a lot for children, because one of the big concerns about plastic additives getting into our bodies is that they mimic estrogen and can have endocrine-disrupting properties, meaning they mess with your hormone system.

And for a developing hormone system in a child, that’s especially crucial. It’s also crucial for pregnant people or people of childbearing age. So there’s different moments when it’s really critical to avoid this stuff.

Rosin: Okay, so we have to throw out those plastics. We do have to cook, though. We’re back preparing the Thanksgiving meal. What is a substitute for the plastic spatula? What kind of spatulas do you have?

Schlanger: I have silicone spatulas—they’re great—wooden spatulas, and stainless-steel spatulas.

Rosin: Interesting. I just got my first wooden spatula. My friend’s mother, who lives in Norway, gave it to me, and it was made by hand by her neighbor on the farm. And I don’t understand why I’ve never used a wood spatula before. It’s fantastic. Like, it’s so good.

Schlanger: It’s a great material. I think people hate that you can’t really put them in the dishwasher, but you just rinse it off. No big deal.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So silicone. Is silicone always okay? What is silicone?

Schlanger: Silicone, to my understanding, is made out of a number of things, but notably silica, which is essentially sand, which is the same thing that glass is made out of.

So as far as we know now, silicone is inert. It’s considered not reactive with food or with body material, with fat, or anything like that. So I think all signs right now point to silicone being a very good choice. I know that at very high temperatures, I think if you’re baking at above 400 or 500 degrees, silicone can emit a gas of some kind that might be a problem, but if you have to bake in something that isn’t stainless steel or ceramic or cast iron, that’s not the worst thing in the world. I’m pro-silicone for now. I mean, maybe we’ll learn something else later.

[Music]

Rosin: When we return, Zoë and I keep going through the kitchen list, from sippy cups to gas stoves.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So no plastic spatulas. Sort of no plastic storage containers. I asked people on Instagram—I posted your article, and I asked people on Instagram, and I got a lot of questions from people about other things in their kitchen. So can I run them by you?

Schlanger: Please.

Rosin: Okay. No. 1: sippy cups. They’re always labeled as BPA-free plastic. I remember that. Even when I had little kids, everything was BPA-free. Does that make a difference?

Schlanger: In a way, it does. BPA was researched intensively. We know it’s bad, and so everyone’s trying to avoid making things with it. But then what companies went and did was create a bunch of alternatives to BPA, which at least some research finds is not any better than the BPA. The way that chemicals are regulated in this country is: No one has to really prove they’re safe before they go in the market.

And so we have a trickle of information coming out that suggests that the replacements aren’t any better. I would say no to plastic sippy cups.

Rosin: Whoa. Whoa. You said it, though. Okay. Just to be very accurate about this, you said “a trickle of information.”

So there was a kind of panic about BPA. People created replacements for BPA. But we just don’t know yet if they’re better, and the early signs are that they may not be. Is that a fair summary?

Schlanger: Exactly. There was this moment in, like, 2015, 2016 when there was a smattering of studies coming out highlighting the BPA replacements and looking at their potential toxicity and finding that they might just be as endocrine disrupting as BPA was. So the thing with BPA is that it mimics estrogen in the body, which is not something you want to keep adding through your diet.

And it’s associated with all kinds of issues—thyroid issues, fertility issues. And researchers on these few studies I saw back then found that the replacements were as estrogenic or more so.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. I really want to Google, What is a safe sippy cup? But instead, I’m going to ask you. Do you know what a safe sippy cup is?

Schlanger: I was actually talking to this pediatrician about this for a story, and she was talking about how the rest of the world gives their kids things in stainless-steel containers. Like, it’s just, you know—you don’t have plastic plates for kids. You just have stainless-steel ones that they can throw on the floor.

And I know they make stainless-steel ones with, like, the silicone sippy tops and stuff for kids now.

Rosin: It’s interesting. I think we think of stainless steel as something—like metallic. There’s something that we resist about stainless steel, like it’s going to taste different or something. But you’re saying it’s safer.

Schlanger: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. “Oh yeah,” you say. That means it’s definitely safer. (Laughs.)

Okay. Another one that people ask me a lot about—a lot, actually—were the black plastic lids on coffee cups.

Schlanger: This just occurred to me recently. I mean, yeah. Presumably, if it’s black plastic, there is a chance it came from that material stream of recycled e-waste. And the last thing you want is scalding hot, foamy, creamy coffee passing through a little black plastic hole into your mouth. It’s not ideal. So I actually just got coffee right before this and did not take a lid.

Rosin: Yes, this is absolutely true: Someone sent me that request on Instagram—Please ask Zoë about black plastic coffee lids—almost at the instant that the barista in the place that I was put the black plastic coffee lid on top of my coffee, and I had the same reaction you did. I was like: Of course! And just flipped it right off again.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Oh boy. Okay. So No. 2 on Instagram that people asked a ton about—I bet you can guess: nonstick cookware.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: So many questions about nonstick cookware. Are there different kinds? Do I throw it out the second it has a scratch on it? Like: What do I do about nonstick cookware?

I think there’s a whole bunch of sort of short-term memory-hole feelings about it. Like, Ah, I kind of read this thing. But then, I like my pan, so I forgot about it.

Schlanger: Yeah. So I’d start by saying that the issue with nonstick—Teflon is one brand name for this, but there’s a bunch of them—nonstick pans are coated in a class of chemicals called PFAS. And these are also coating things like our raincoats, our hiking boots. Just anything that is nonstick is basically made out of these compounds that we’ve now found are very bad for our health in high concentrations.

So the people who are really affected by this are the ones living near a plant that made PFAS, and now their water supply has been contaminated for 30 years, or people who live near an Army base where they are using a lot of firefighting foam, which is full of PFAS. But then you zoom in on people using individual products, and it becomes a little hazier.

We do know that the PFAS in your pan becomes unstable at high temperatures. So there’s lots of warnings on these things that you’re not really supposed to use them to cook at, you know, temperatures higher than 400 or 500 degrees.

But who doesn’t accidentally leave their pan on the stove sometimes and scorch it, and then it smells terrible? You’re breathing in fumes from PFAS, most likely. You mentioned scratched coatings. It’s super easy to scratch. Actually, the No. 1 response to the “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula”—when I was like, Just get stainless-steel ones—people were like, But it’ll scratch my nonstick pan. And just, my response to that is: Throw out your nonstick pan.

But we can’t necessarily ask everyone to do that. I get that. It’s so convenient to make an egg in a nonstick pan. I haven’t done it in years, but I hear it’s great.

Rosin: (Laughs.) That was amazing, Zoë. That was a great judge-but-not-judge.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I don’t mean to sound judgy, but honestly, cast iron is just so much better.

Rosin: I’ve recently come to that conclusion. I noticed that my first reach for everything, including an egg these days, is my cast-iron skillet. So I’m like, Why don’t I just get a few more of those and call it a day, you know?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: So you do not use nonstick pans?

Schlanger: So I grew up in a house with a parrot when I was young, and bird owners know that cooking with nonstick pans could result in the death of your bird, so I just grew up not having them around.

Rosin: Why?

Schlanger: I think it’s because the gas volatilizes. PFAS, the nonstick compound, its fumes get in the air, and birds are much more sensitive than humans, like all small animals.

Rosin: This is a literal canary in a coal mine.

Schlanger: Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

Rosin: I feel like that image, more than anything you’re gonna say, is gonna convince people: If they had a bird, that bird would be dead. So these are real.

Schlanger: I mean, yeah. I feel like it’s the kind of thing with, like, dogs and chocolates. Like, they won’t die every time. But there was a chance, so we didn’t have it in the house. But there was never a discussion about it being bad for human health. It was just like, No, you have a pet bird. You can’t have nonstick.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. So no nonstick pans. Another one that came up, and this is specifically related to Thanksgiving: marinating things in plastic. Like, it is something that people do. It’s something that people do on Thanksgiving. Is that a problem?

Schlanger: I wouldn’t do it. My understanding is that—I was thinking about, like, sous vide bags too, you know?

Rosin: Yeah, like brining turkeys or sous vide bags. There’s a whole bunch of ways that meat and plastic have to do with each other.

Schlanger: It would violate my personal rule about, like, putting fatty things next to plastic, because I just know the chemistry of that means it encourages migration of compounds out of the plastic and into your food.

But my understanding is that the bags specifically designed for this are considered food grade and often can be labeled “phthalate-free” now. So there is knowledge about this in the consumer market enough for companies to make things that are less harmful. That’s not to say they’re not potentially problematic.

I mean, the way I think about this is: Everything could affect you negatively a little bit. And we are so bombarded by problematic things in our everyday life getting into our bodies, and you just want to lower your dose. So it’s kind of choosing how to lower your dose.

It’s not that your turkey bag is going to kill you. It’s that you’re just adding a little extra, and you don’t need to.

Rosin: Right. So if you needed to brine something, and you put it in, say, a glass bowl with plastic wrap on it, is it just that—oh God.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, so no to that, just because the plastic wrap would touch it. So in fact, you should just use tinfoil, is what you’re saying.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm. Or you just put a plate over it. Like, you don’t even need all this stuff. You know, plastic wrap’s gone through all these iterations. It used to be made out of much more harmful stuff, and then they eliminated some of it. I just avoid it.

Rosin: Really? You have no plastic wrap?

Schlanger: No.

Rosin: So you’re making a cake. What do you put over it? You just put a cake topper?

Schlanger: A bowl.

Rosin: You put a bowl or a cake topper? Okay. I’m trying to think of any other use I have for plastic wrap, particularly on Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: I wrap—you know, you get cheese, and you have to wrap it in something, so it doesn’t go bad immediately. I have—this is going to make me sound so crunchy—but I have those beeswax wraps. It’s like cloth waxed in beeswax, and that’s what people—people used to just use wax paper for everything. You can just do that.

Rosin: And you can reuse that, so that’s good. Okay.

I’m already imagining some of the people listening to this podcast walking into the kitchen of their parents and friends and causing all kinds of trouble. And this one is real trouble, but I’m going to ask you anyway, because a couple of people asked me about it: natural-gas stove.

So like, hassling your friends or parents about their natural-gas stove would be, like, a really, really low move. But I’m going to ask you anyway. There’s just so much talk about this. It was a big deal, like, a year ago. What about it?

Schlanger: So we know it’s not great to be in a home with a natural-gas stove. We know that it is associated with higher rates of child asthma, just breathing problems in general. You’re inhaling things like benzene. That said, many people have them. I have one. I’m a renter in New York. There’s no way I’m not going to have a gas stove. I can’t ask my landlord to buy a beautiful induction stove for me.

But one thing that makes a big difference is using your overhead vent, just gently turning on your family’s overhead vent while they’re cooking can actually take a lot of the problematic compounds out of the air.

Rosin: Oh really?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: Okay.

Schlanger: It’s not totally a fail-safe. It doesn’t get it all out. It would be nice if we all had induction stoves. But I also get, it does sometimes feel good to cook over fire.

Rosin: Yeah. One day I will make the transition, but I’m so used to seeing the fire. But I understand.

Schlanger: I will say that that is a really elaborate PR job by the natural-gas industry too. Do you remember this? There was this moment when they were, like, hiring Instagram influencers to promote gas stoves and things like that.

Rosin: Because it’s one of those things that seems good and natural but is the exact opposite. Like, it looks like the thing that you should be cooking things on, but in fact, it’s the unnatural option.

Schlanger: Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, that was pretty good. Okay. So what else are we missing for Thanksgiving that we don’t know about? One just came to me: parchment paper. I bake a lot with parchment paper.

Schlanger: As do I. And I only recently learned that some parchment paper is coated in PFAS. That’s what makes it nonstick. So you actually want to check. And I recently got parchment paper that’s coated in silicone instead and is nice and nonstick because of that, and it doesn’t cost any more.

Rosin: Oh really? You have to look online and see what it’s coated with. Interesting.

Anything else we’ve forgotten about the Thanksgiving dinner? Let’s just do a tour. So you walk into an average kitchen. There are containers with plastic wrap on them. We’ve already covered that. There are things that have been cooked with nonstick pans. We’ve already covered that. There are deadly spatulas. We’ve covered that. (Laughs.)

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Anything else that we are forgetting for a typical Thanksgiving meal that could kill you?

Schlanger: Right. None of this is going to kill you, but I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy a slow cooker and pressure cooker, and I really wanted to get an Instant Pot. And then I went online and looked at their disclosures on the website, and it turns out those can contain PFAS. I was really surprised by that because the basin of an Instant Pot is just a stainless-steel bowl, but my assumption is there’s something in the lid that is in the food-contact surface that is also PFAS.

So just basically, many, many other kitchen appliances are coated in a nonstick layer of PFAS. I also tried to buy a toaster oven, like, for the counter, so I wouldn’t have to turn on my gas oven every single time I wanted to bake something, and a lot of those—the entire interior is just coated in PFAS.

Rosin: Interesting. So how do you figure—so your rule is: Very much limit plastics to almost no plastics, and definitely no PFAS.

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: And how do you know if something has PFAS? Like, I wouldn’t have guessed about an Instant Pot, which I do have, or about a toaster oven, which I don’t have. But I wouldn’t have guessed about either of those.

Schlanger: They put it on their website. If you look in, like, the Materials and Care section of most of these things, it’ll let you know.

Rosin: Okay. So maybe now that we have—would you say, is there any way to say that we haven’t ruined people’s Thanksgivings? Like, no. We’ve made them less stress-free? Possible? Depends when they listen to this?

Schlanger: Well, it’s so important to remember: Stress is also a major health hazard, so I don’t want anyone to get super stressed out about this or blow it out of proportion. You’re not going to die because of any of this, but you are just accumulating things you don’t need in your body.

Rosin: Your kitchen is just slightly less stress for you. Like, you look around your kitchen, and because you’re attuned to microplastics, you just don’t see them everywhere. So in fact, for you, it’s less stress.

Schlanger: Yeah. I walk around all day. There’s so many inputs to my body I can’t control. But at least I can control the ones in my kitchen.

Rosin: Right. Your kitchen is a little sphere of control. I actually really like that idea.

Now, I’m having a Friendsgiving this year, and I am now actually gonna drive to my friend’s house who does most of the cooking and “evacuate” the dangerous utensils from his kitchen.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I hope he thanks you and doesn’t get really pissed off. That could go either way.

Rosin: (Laughs.) As I fling away all his spatulas.

Schlanger: Are you going to bring him replacements?

Rosin: I guess you’re right. If I throw away all his spatulas, before I do that, I have to bring him silicone replacements for sure.

Schlanger: That seems only reasonable. I will say, you know, on other Thanksgivings, my two sides of my family have very different ideas about all this. So there is, like, one home I’d go into where basically everything is, you know, natural products and the other side where everything would be microwaved in plastic.

Rosin: Wow. So how do you handle that situation?

Schlanger: You just mostly have to live and let live. It’s like, also, you know, if I’m their daughter, and they’re not reading my articles, there’s not much I’m going to do, you know?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. I didn’t realize that was your actual parents. That’s funny. Yeah, I suppose the last thing we should do is give advice to people who walk into a kitchen, and everything has been, you know, baked in the microwave in plastic containers.

Schlanger: You just eat that meal, and go back to your own kitchen, and think about your own choices. I mean, okay, this is all to say: You eat in restaurants all the time. Restaurants are using plastic constantly. It’s really just like, you lower your own dose when you can.

Rosin: Yes. I think that’s what it comes down to. It’s not about policing everybody’s plastics and everything you put in your body. It’s about controlling what you can. And your own tiny or big or however size your kitchen is, that is a sphere you can control, so you might as well do that. And that’s a lovely thing. And everything outside of that, don’t worry about it.

Schlanger: I think so. I think that’s the moral here.

Rosin: Okay. Excellent. Thank you, Zoë.

Schlanger: Thank you.

Rosin: Happy Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: Happy Thanksgiving.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the turkey. Enjoy the mashed potatoes. Enjoy the stuffing. And enjoy all the plastic you’re eating.

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