Seriously Moms...

I work at a huge megastore that caters strictly to babies. I do this to kill time while we are living in Portland and Jay is finding a job, and before I start nursing school in August. I would normally mention the name of the store here and show you a picture of the logo, but I signed an agreement that said that I would never do such a thing because it's blasphemous. Let me just say that we take our orders from a very large, make believe giraffe. Who may or may not be dyslexic.

So the last few weeks at work have been very entertaining because the media is creating much hype about Bisphenol-A, or BPA. BPA is what makes hard plastic clear. And it's been in our plastic for many, many years.

I'm no expert here, and am not at all professing to be, but as I understand it, bpa is under severe scrutiny and investigation for, among other things, causing fertility problems, and I think it targets male infants especially hard.

I can't tell you how many hysterical moms have turned off their tv's after listening to a news flash that they barely understood, thrown their kids in the car, come screeching into our parking lot, and running into the store and demanding that I show them every chemical-free plastic baby bottle we carry. Because they don't simply want to get rid of the bpa in their bottles. They want to go one step beyond and skip all the chemicals in the plastic altogether.

I used to have fun with this conversation, pretending that we had a chemical-free plastic bottle to offer them, because I thought the moms were kidding. Then I would realize they were serious and I would explain that I could show them the bpa-free bottles, but no, they wanted to see all of the chemical-free plastics.

Moms, there is no such thing as chemical-free plastic!

Before you jump in the car and head for the store with the backwards R, stop for a second and think about it. What do you suppose the other ingredients in plastic are? It's not water, sugar, and flour with a little BPA thrown in.

I have honest to goodness had this conversation at least a dozen times. It always starts out, "Hi. I was just watching the news about that BSP stuff that's in plastic bottles and I just threw all my bottles away and wanted to get some that don't have any chemicals in them." "Oh," I say, "do you mean you want bpa-free plastic or glass?" "No, I want the plastic that doesn't have any chemicals."

If I can get you few moms who read this to share the news with another few moms, word just might start to spread that if you want a chemical-free plastic bottle, it's called glass, and it's just down the aisle.

Thank you.