No? If no plastic is in the chewing gum base, then it’s not from the chewing gum base.

You didn’t even get past the title, apparently. If the methodology changes everything, do share. (I mean it that this was helpful, though)

You could say the background amount that just got in as a contaminant is too much, which is a stance you can take, but isn’t what we’re talking about.

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the details.

but piefed is gaining users faster than Lemmy is losing them.

Wonderful! Glad to hear it. The last thing I heard was just the slow shrinking.

It can’t really go wrong, since it’s an open standard. Slow, steady growth will get us there eventually. Or intermittent growth.

Unfortunately fediverse.observer shut down recently so it’s hard to find the past stats these days.

Boo!

This whole thread seems like a paranoid psychosis symptom. Because you stopped your meds, you’re no longer feeling well. You just can’t tell.

I may or may not know “the business of psychiatry”, but your psychiatrists definitely do. So do mine. I’m not trying to be mean, here, either.

Surprisingly, synthetic chewing gum released a similar (p > 0.8) number of microplastics as natural or plant-based chewing gums.

So basically, there’s microplastics in it as a contaminent, like in actual food. The base itself conclusively doesn’t generate them.

Thank you for finding the research that confirms it empirically. I was just going off of material science, before.

Users in general, or active users? Reddit probably has tens of billions of inactive accounts.

If it is active users, and Lemmy-Piefed is suddenly growing, that’s great, though.

Depends on the plastic. Goo doesn’t flake, regardless of how close you look. They actually use that principle to keep dust out of semiconductor cleanrooms.

Although, if you’re really worried, you could just suck on a breath mint. Probably get rid of any plastic kitchen utensils, as well. Those definitely shed particles.

If you can put a plastic straw in your mouth…

It is kind of weird, but the reasoning holds. Certain artificial polymers may well be allowed in a lot of countries. The EU doesn’t even like mixing wine grapes, though, so maybe not them.

Microplastics specifically mean small bits, like hard plastic that’s crumbled. Gum is more like a really soft rubber. If you swallow it, then that’s a macroplastic. If you don’t, it’s fine, because it’s not really flaking off.

Like someone else mentioned, they can also use natural, but still inedible ingredients to provide the chewyness, not just artificial polymers.

A few years back, that really felt like where things were going. Now, everything’s coming apart; you can’t really have a quiet sleepwalk into the great benevolent authority watching everything, when it’s not clear which authority that would be.

Loud shifts into surveillance are possible, like sometimes happen after a new regime is established, but that’s a different beast. People will kinda know it’s fucked, even if they go along with it.

No, you should take your pills. Those aren’t the kind of pills you stop taking when you’re better.

Much, much less. Reddit has some fraction of a billion active users, going by it’s status as one of the big world platforms, while we have some fraction of 10,000, so more like 0.001%.

Yeah, it seems likely that even if a longhouse had one big kitchen where the whole clan prepared their maize, the skills to run it would have been fairly evenly distributed. Maybe in only one gender, or even a subset of one gender, but if there’s 200 of you and you’re always together, not much will be secret. Ditto for a bunch of peasants on one manor in Europe.

You should really have a way to change up the texture, as well. Even if spaghetti, a pizza, lasagna and shakshuka are all starch and tomatoes, they feel different.

Since I see a few people just posting their favourite websites, I’ve gotten some good vegetarian stuff off Cookie and Kate.

Eh. We’re more like bugs than we like to pretend.

You know, you don’t have to be a chef, but some vegetables wouldn’t hurt. They don’t even have to be fresh.

Not a gourmet 12 course meal. Just cook simply to feed yourself. This is a basic skill.

It’s a massive distinction that nobody explained to me when I was a kid, too. 10% of the effort gets you 90% of the result. The gourmet shit, where you hunt for a million weird heirloom ingredients, is mostly a flex.

Stopped scrolling for Budget Bytes. Awesome website!

my parents cooking consisted of 1) BBQ a piece of meat until it’s real dry and 2) microwave a can of veggies.

Yeah, come to think of it, old white people are the real offenders, there. Good food existed both before and during their time; it’s not that they didn’t have the chance.

That being said, canned veggies are an underrated ingredient.

What kind of cooking isn’t prep+assembly+processing, in some order?

I really wish cheap public cafeterias were more of a thing. We don’t spin our own clothes, or weave our own baskets anymore…