Our son — and former JI reporter — Aidan Levy bugged me several times last week why I wasn’t writing a column about the soup mugs he had ordered. I thought he was joking.
Aidan, his wife, their 17-month-old daughter, their cat, our daughter, her husband, and their dog have been quarantining in our house for weeks, joining my wife, me, and our dog, Latke. We have a packed post-empty-nester household with an array of daily work and dining schedules and chores to do, prompting lots of interactions, needs, and innovations, big and small. Aidan had been pondering soup.
“I primarily was concerned that in heating soup in a bowl in the microwave the bowl would get so hot that I couldn’t grab it,” he explained. “On one occasion I got so surprised by the temperature of the bowl that it fell out of my hand, and I immediately spilled all of the soup.”
He then began to search for a bowl that wouldn’t overheat. “I was also concerned that the bowls I used wouldn’t heat evenly. Even if you stirred it you’d ended up with intensely hot pockets and pockets that were lukewarm.”
In our situation it’s significant. “If all seven of us are eating soup for lunch, it creates traffic with our one microwave,” he said. “Ideally, you want to heat your soup once, because once you take your bowl out of the microwave, someone else in line may spend two or three minutes heating his or her soup. Since it’s crowded in the kitchen you want to easily grab your bowl, because someone’s right behind you, and you might drop it if it’s too hot. I wanted something with a lid on it and a handle.”
He did some research and found Soup Mugs made by Sistema, a New Zealand company selling a three-pack of the plastic shatter-resistant, air-tight, leak-proof containers, which have lids with locking clips and pressure-release vents “for splatter-free microwave reheating” and handles that supposedly don’t get hot. They are also phthalate-free* and BPA-free (see note at the end of the column).
“We read some reviews and ordered the mugs,” our son said, “and if we weren’t impressed, we’d just send them back. But we were quite impressed, and we’ve been using them for soup or vegetables several times a week ever since.”
I decided to do a comparison test, heating a regular bowl of tomato soup and the same amount of soup in the mug, each for two minutes.
The result: The mug’s handle was not hot, and the soup was evenly cooked. The regular bowl was scaldingly hot when I tried to take it out of the microwave, and the soup needed stirring. It was bubbling and boiling at the top and lukewarm underneath.
Note: Phthalates are chemicals added to plastics to make them more flexible and harder to break. They have been found to damage the liver, kidneys, lungs, and reproductive system, according to the Ecology Center.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it “is concerned about phthalates because of their toxicity and the evidence of pervasive human and environmental exposure.”
BPA is an industrial chemical used to harden plastic. Many studies deem it safe, although the National Institutes of Health says it contributes “to cancer development and progression.”
