June 6, 2005

Tales From The Crib

The death of a microwave

“You’re the kind of people I can say this to ... .” Our friend Brian was sitting in our tiny kitchen. He peeked out from under the brim of his baseball cap, neck cocked like a turtle’s, a glint in his eye. “Last year we got rid of our microwave.” Brian took off his cap and mussed his hair. “Turns out they’re really toxic.”

Jennifer Margulis

I sighed, clattering plates and checking on whole-grain biscuits that refused to brown. Our three kids and Brian’s two clamored for more milk and demanded the biscuits. Our kitchen was so small that when I went to get the milk I banged the fridge door into the table, and into my husband’s knees.

“Oh, I know,” I answered offhandedly. I could feel my mind narrowing as I said it. Instead of evincing healthy curiosity by asking Brian some questions and finding out more, I wanted to dismiss his observation. I liked our state-of-the-art microwave. We used it all the time — to reheat food, to warm up washcloths and a grain-filled heating pad. I shut my mind like a door.

I already knew something about the dangers of microwaves. I knew food should never be microwaved in plastic containers because doing so makes the plastic leech dangerous chemicals — a fact that I can never seem to explain clearly enough to my mother-in-law or any of the extended family to make them stop doing it. And my brother’s girlfriend, a scientist, had once told me that a study showed that people had higher white blood cell counts in their bodies after eating microwaved food, suggesting that the microwaves change the food into something our bodies don’t recognize and want to fight. She xeroxed a stack of papers about the dangers of microwaves for my mother, who never read them. I didn’t either.

But that night after the kids went to bed, James and I sat down with our laptop and read all of the arguments against microwaving food available on the Web. We found more than we expected, including an article published in the “Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture” (November 2003) that compared health-enhancing substances in freshly harvested broccoli before it was cooked and then again after it was cooked four different ways: with high-pressure boiling, low-pressure boiling, steaming, and microwaving. The study found clear but disturbing results: microwaving the broccoli made it lose 97 percent of its flavinoids, 74 percent of its sinapic acid derivatives, and 87 percent of its caffeoyl-quinic acid derivatives. This is a fancy and complicated way of saying what my brother and his girlfriend had long ago intuited: microwaving food destroys the food’s vital nutrients.

We also learned that the process of microwaving food changes the molecules so drastically that it creates compounds that have never been seen before, the effects of which are unknown, and that in 1991 a patient died from being given a transfusion of blood warmed in a microwave. Blood, it turns out, is routinely warmed up for transfusions. But microwaved blood is lethal.

Then we read about the research of a Swiss scientist named Hans Hertel, whose findings on the dangers of microwaves were silenced for five years by a Swiss association of dealers of household and industry appliances.

A quick stroll down any appliance store is enough to realize why: microwaves are big business. Aside from Brian and one of my three brothers, every other person I know in America and abroad has a microwave. The Swiss association, and manufacturers of microwaves everywhere, have a lot to lose if we all stop using their products. Indeed, Dr. Hertel was charged with interfering with commerce — which is clearly more important than human health — and prohibited from further publishing his results for years.

That was enough. We shut down the computer.

My husband looked sick.

The next day we boxed up the microwave. It’s not always easy to clean pasta and cheese off the bottom of a steel pot, but I don’t miss it. As Brian later put it, even if only a fraction of what we found out on the Web is true about microwaves, that is ample reason not to expose our children to them. Besides, disposing of the microwave freed up some much needed space on the kitchen counter.

Jennifer Margulis now lives in a microwave-free house with a bigger kitchen in Ashland. The editor of “Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love” (Seal Press), she has a new book coming out this fall called “Why Babies Do That” (Willow Creek Press).