I’ve been wanting to write about this topic for a while now. What better day than today because it’s Friday. Friday is the day I write my grocery list. It’s also the day I pick up my CSA share, which will dictate what’s on that grocery list.

As a rule, I buy local and fresh, and keep the cans in my cupboard to an absolute minimum. That is, until my husband, a sucker for a bargain, will run out for shaving cream or vitamins and inevitably, walks in the door with bags full of canned beans that were “on sale” so he’d thought he’d stock up “because we always need beans.”

Yes, and that’s true. But I already have several bags of dried beans at the ready. I have to remind him of this each time he heads out to the store.

I’m on guard about buying anything commercially canned. Why? One, simple acronym: BPA.

It stands for Bisphenol A, a chemical that acts like the hormone estrogen in your body and is used to create the epoxy linings of canned food and is also found in plastic bottles.

According to the FDA website, “Both the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health and FDA have some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children.”

And its use in canned food is the number one reason why 90 percent of Americans have it in their bodies. So what do you do? The FDA is working with the canning industry to eliminate the use of BPA in linings, but until it is banned, you have to do your research to find products that are made without it. Or buy products fresh or stored in jars or cartons, instead. Or make it yourself. Beans, for instance, don’t have to be canned. Just soak and boil the dried ones and go from there.