Stuff like this needs to be a bigger deal then a news article. That is the only way to stop this from happening. The CEOs and supply chain managers need to be brought in front of a panel and thoroughly reviewed as to what happened and why. If it is determined to be the result of any cost cutting strategy they need to be immediately held liable with monetary and potentially jail time if it's severe enough. This is the only way this will stop happening is if people are scared to do it. Right now this happens constantly and in a week everyone will have forgotten, in a month the recall notices will disappear from every grocery store and people will resume buying applesauce pouches.
I hadn't heart about this but, to summarize, two people received capital punishment over this, one suspended death sentence, 3 life imprisonments, 2 15 year jail terms, and 13 others with lesser jail terms.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-01/23/content_742298...
It looks like they got contaminated cinnamon. Lead (II,IV) oxide (red lead) is a reddish-brown pigment which could have been used to adulterate the cinnamon to make it look better (hide imperfections since it's close to the color of high-quality cinnamon bark). Similar to how lead (II) chromate gets added to turmeric to hide imperfections. So I'd not rule out deliberate addition of red lead to allow selling a cheaper product.
Really? It occurred in multiple food packagers, suggesting a supply problem. Do you know how many American suppliers make cinnamon domestically? I believe that number is very close to zero.
I’d much prefer these guys generate money rather than be an ongoing cost to taxpayers. Allow them on some kind of supervised work-release program with every bit of income over a certain amount above going towards care for their victims.
The point of punishment is deterrence. You maximize value by facilitating a culture that doesn't lie, cheat, steal, and do harm to others.
The value a single person can generate is dwarfed by the value an ethical culture will.
"Worse case scenario, I have to live like middle America" is a terrible deterrent.
If these folk have already demonstrated they are willing to harm others in order to "generate money", having them do more of that seems... counterproductive.
Harm done to others, meanwhile, is not free. Each of the affected toddlers will have had hospital time, and could have had a productive life of "generating money" had they not been killed by a fruit pouch; so even if you throw morality under the bus and focus purely on picking the outcome that "generates money"... society loses much more money with the death of a toddler than it gains with the sale of a fruit pouch. If it turns out that someone deliberately made that choice, that person is a risk to society and must be prevented from acting in ways that might cause further harm in the future.
Oh, and this is in the case the child dies.... survival may be worse. Lead and the developing brain are two things that should never mix. The mental declines caused by lead will leave a damaged, crippled human being robbed of their abilities.
It's a combination of calling the defects the healthy state, and making things up. Yes, healthy children will not want to play with the deficient children, and see them as low status. There is nothing undesirable about that, it seems to be a conserved reaction, even fruit flies do that. The sane solution is to make everyone a noble. Rooting for the cripples is not reasonable.
To clarify, I didn’t mean “can keep their current job”. My thought was that this is a crime of greed: the kind of CEO who’s going to cut corners to save a buck is going to be as deterred by the prospect of never in their life being in authority or better off than working class but taxpayers are better off if that guy’s staying out of jail to pay his victims than being a pure cost in jail.
Would you trust such a person not to throw others around them under the bus to benefit themselves if they are left free to exploit such opportunities in daily life, even once they are no longer CEOs of anything?
I wouldn't. I used to have such faith in humans once, but, well, lead in toddler food.
It’ll come down to what an investigation turns up. If they knowingly picked lead, sure, lock them up like any other poisoner. What I’d bet will turn up, however, is that they picked the lowest bidder and did the legal minimum required testing. In that case, I have trouble saying they’re uniquely dangerous to the public unless we’re also jailing, say, the CEOs of fossil fuel or tobacco companies, big meat suppliers like Tyson’s and the farmers whose worker mistreatment reliably produces E. coli outbreaks, or, for that matter, people who drive around looking at their phones since we could save ~40k lives a year by doing nothing more violent than taking away driver’s licenses from irresponsible people.
It’s natural to be angry here but I think what we should be doing is channeling this anger into demands for more aggressive regulation. Waiting until people get sick is too late, we should expect things like lead or salmonella testing to be done constantly. We could crucify the CEO of this company on livestream and it wouldn’t have much lasting impact because the kind of people who do this think the odds of getting caught are low – change that and it’ll have a much bigger impact.
> I mean people will smuggle drugs into Singapore under the penalty of death
Yeah, but how many? Singapore has a very small drug trade when you consider its wealth per-capita. Most counties with similar wealth have trades several times larger per-capita.
You can't completely eliminate a crime no matter what punishments you hand out. Someone people are just blind to risk. However, that doesn't mean punishing people is futile. It has a demonstrable effect.
Now, I do believe that checks and balances that prevent crime are generally more effective than punishments, but punishments are still necessary to add risk to gaps in prevention.
That doesn't mean anything out of context. Yes, there are drug busts, but the size and frequency are much less than would be expected in a US or EU city of the same size and wealth. Even less than the percapita average of Japan if I'm not mistaken, which itself has laws nearly as strict.
> but the size and frequency are much less than would be expected in a US or EU city of the same size and wealth.
That's a claim that needs some data to back it up.
Singapore has 3.5M people. Kilograms of heroin is a huge amount. It's in the dozens of kilograms per year, and that's not counting all the heroin that doesn't get seized.
> You're really suggesting criminals should go free as long as we cap their maximum income?
Not free but under some kind of program where they’re allowed to stay out of prison in some kind of supervised program. These guys were greedy, not axe murderers, and I don’t think there’s much public risk as long as they’re no longer in a position where they can make decisions which affect other people’s health again.
I know it can feel satisfying to light the torches and demand vengeance – it’s a primal emotional reaction – but I don’t think it’s going to do anything. I doubt these guys are going to have evidence of intention to deliberately poison anyone, and I doubt that paying to keep them in jail is going to have more positive outcome than being allowed to stay out of jail so they can make restitution payments.
These guys did a lot more damage than any axe murderer ever did. Lining them up against the wall would do a lot to deter other CEOs from cutting corners in this way.
Sure, and if evidence turns up that they consciously chose to put lead into food they might even face serious charges but I sudd as kept this will turn out to be more along the lines of not doing enough to figure out why their cinnamon supplier could be so cheap or doing less testing because they hadn’t seen any problems so far. Once you’re at that level you’re going to need a lot of firing squads…
> That would put them in the same category as your sainted "job creators"
You have badly misunderstood my point. I’m not saying they should be tolerated to protect jobs, only that someone who is not uncontrollably dangerous to the people around them can probably serve society better than as an ongoing $100k/year cost.
You're making an invalid distinction between axe murderers and people that will poison children to make a buck. They are both "uncontrollably dangerous"
That’s only invalid because it’s incorrectly characterizing my position. Yes, anyone who intentionally poisons a child is a risk but in this case it’s orders of magnitude more likely that these guys bought something because it was cheap and didn’t test it carefully enough, verify that certifications about safety were legitimate, etc. and that starts getting into more systemic questions – do our laws actually require them to do anything which they didn’t? – and relative risk comparisons. For example, the most popular vehicles sold in the United States are designed to cause more collisions and more serious injuries or deaths in each collision, which add up to far more children being harmed every year than this horrible food safety failure. I have a hard time saying it makes sense to have a standard here which says we should jail the CEO of this company but not those of the SUV manufacturers.
Giving them life in prison serves as a warning to others looking to cut costs. Also the ones most responsible were executed so they aren’t costing the taxpayer anything now.
Yeah, median was a sloppy choice. My thought was just that someone this greedy is also going to be deterred by the prospect of not making more than, say, a barista or janitor but would jump at the prospect of staying gainfully employed instead going to prison.
Assuming that there is no way to be 100% certain that all food is safe all the time, what do you think is the acceptable amount of poisoning that should be considered safe? 0.001%? Six sigma? There will always be some sort of food contamination going on if people want to buy food.
Is this example outside a normal range in the larger picture? Or is it just an outrage article? Corporations are constantly cost-cutting to keep product prices low for consumers, so that can't really be a way to judge liability.
I am not concerned with 100%s that is impossible, what I am concerned with is negligence within the industry. That's why it would be up to a review, if found guilty then applicable recourse is delt. I can't say what is right/wrong. And maybe nothing could have prevented this, but that doesn't mean it should just be a flyer on grocery stores. There needs to be reasonings and data collected to prevent it from happening again and prevent companies that don't care about you or me from running over us.
He’s obviously talking about SUVs which have no constitutional protection. We need to get assault-style vehicles off the road. Unfortunately the powerful auto lobbies won’t let us.
In a knowledge economy, lead poisoning is basically a death sentence. Those IQ points are lost permanently. So you're put in permanent disadvantage at every level of education, workforce, healthcare (IQ correlates with earnings, and money is needed for good healthcare), judicial system (lower IQ correlates with criminal behavior), etc.
People tainting our food supply with lead should be put behind bars for life.
No, we see the consequences that it causes in young people: The loss of sense of priority, the loss of capacity for independent discovery and the judment of reasonableness, the disruption of normal thinking (leading to making things up, to outright paranoia and psychosis).
Without commenting on how likely it is the hypothesis is true, the lead-crime hypothesis has always been academic handwaving to make a different, political point.
It sort of depends on the nature of the contamination. If it ends up being negligence, if they ever hid anything about it, absolutely. Jail for the executives, fines for the major shareholders.
And if it's not negligence then maybe we need to raise the bar for testing such that any contamination indeed counts as negligence.
But lead is a pretty common metal. If it turns out that there's an undiscovered recessive gene for lead hyperaccumulation in the cinnamon tee and that tragedies like this are how it gets discovered, then we need to focus on raising the testing bar and not on punishment. Otherwise we create a situation where people are incentivized to hide data that could ultimately help prevent things like this in the future.
> If it turns out that there's an undiscovered recessive gene for lead hyperaccumulation in the cinnamon tee and that tragedies like this are how it gets discovered
That's not what happens though, lead poisoning in spices is ~always shady actors adding pigment that's lead-heavy to make the spice (for example, cinnamon, turmeric, ground ginger, paprika) appear more vibrant in color. The Indian government did a whole bunch of work to fight against this a few years back; ultimately it's suppliers trying to adulterate their product to save money and make it look better than it is. This should absolutely be a serious crime, on the level of intentionally shipping any other dangerous product: jail time for executives, huge financial penalties for companies.
Because capitalism doesn't provide enough of a punishment mechanism to discourage this type of behavior? Especially the protectionist crony capitalism that exists in most of the "free world".
Air pollution affects almost everyone equally. It's horrible, but it doesn't put particular individuals at greater disadvantage compared to the rest of the population. E.g. it degrades everyone's SAT scores. Whereas lead poisoning is only affecting those that consumed that particular tainted product.
Without digging into the details of this particular issue, I'll say that working through food choices with kids is an exhausting process.
I have two girls - ages 5, 22 months. They both love pouches. I don't love that they love pouches. But, if it comes down to eating/consuming anything vs. not, I'm often siding with consumption vs. nothing.
Of course, I can make food for them with high-quality ingredients, and do, but it is nearly impossible to force a kid to eat something you want them to eat vs. whatever it is they have in mind (like a pouch).
I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in. And, tough to control the situation once they are mostly not at home (school, daycare, w/nanny/friends/etc.)
Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches.
We bought a few when we started to transition to solids but never used them. Our one year old eats the protein we are eating (and has since about six months) and then has her own vegetables, cheese, chickpea pasta, etc.
Pouches aren’t a reality for her and thus she won’t ask for one. Same with gold fish, fruit juice and a ton of other metabolic disasters. Granted this is easy right now and, to your point, is going to get harder when she enters the school system. I’ll need a strategy for that next.
There is no strategy. You're up against the best devils Madison Avenue has to offer and peer pressure. Even if you win on this front you're going to lose on others. That's the fact of raising a kid in the 21st century in an advertising-saturated culture.
> Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches.
TBH this does sound like a real jerk comment (especially given the lack of any ability to travel backwards in time), but it is nonetheless correct. IME, the less they have of that stuff the less the less they'll want it.
Still, different kids are different. When dealing with a kid who's lost their mind due to hunger (and for those who doubt, that's a real thing, not an exaggeration), having to choose between offering healthy food or no food can be a no-win situation.
I wish you the best of luck - not cynically. Especially when your kid can buy their own lunch at school (even if you packed one).
In my school district, they will NOT stop a kid from eating what they want to eat. Personally, I don't argue with that. They need to consume something so better it be something that they'll actually eat than nothing (which happens, trust me)
I only have one kid but our experience matched yours: we didn't change our own eating habits once we had a kid (well, fewer restaurants) and kid got what we got (not solid food when baby of course, and milder curries) so there wasn't really much to argue about. We didn't care what he ate when visiting friends, or at school, and didn't make a big deal about it. Two parents from two countries, both immigrants: our food was just what it was. Now he's grown up and eats better than I do.
And that was my own experience too: 60 years ago we brought "weird" lunches compared to the other kids at school. We all traded a bit of course and I don't remember it being a big deal, though my sister complained so maybe I was just an oblivious nerd.
That's a great plan, until you're exhausted at the grocery store and your kid sees another kid eating one and starts screaming that they want one.
Source: parent who swore up and down that they were going to make their own purees, and immediately caved when they realized just how much gddmn*d food a 9 month old goes through in a week. I was sure I was going to be a hyper-organic, make everything fresh type parent, and now we give him frozen pancakes and squeeze pouches. It turns out that getting kids calories is hard enough without having to make it all yourself.
And them getting any calories is usually more important than me being super choosy about the composition of those calories. I was very proactive about all of this for quite a while but have relaxed somewhat as things evolve at home.
Also, many things fall into the not-ideal bucket. That doesn’t just mean the quality of the ingredients but also the specific food. Someone else mentioned chickpea pasta - and it’s great. But it’s also still partially processed. But because it’s not pure generic pasta, it’s ok? I don’t know.
I really prioritize the quality of things as much as possible rather than worrying in detail about whether they are metabolic superpowers or the opposite.
So why did you get them? If the children are so incredibly fussy that nothing else helps, sure, in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that. I'm sure my four year old gets fed things I wouldn't choose at times, but those are rare exceptions, and at school, after school childcare, and before that day-care, this type of product is just not provided, nor condoned (parents are instructed to provide the child's lunch and fruit for school; parents who give the child a 'pouch' like that do get called out on that).
I don't think my kid even knows these exist.
> I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in.
How? Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries.
Most likely, they didn't know what would happen. Sure, "everyone knows" this stuff is not the best choice, but also every parent knows that at least half of what "everyone knows" is pure, unadulterated, value-negative bullshit.
Or, perhaps their well-meaning friends or relatives got the first pouch.
> in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that
Sure, until the first time they taste the stuff.
We held off with sweets until our older one was ~3 y.o., but this is a feat you can't repeat with a younger sibling, unless you run some kind of ridiculously efficient home prison. Our younger one got up to speed with everything in terms of food and entertainment with her older sister, by then 4 y.o., simply because the latter was always happy to share.
I mean, we probably could've stopped it if we really tried. But this stuff isn't even particularly dangerous, unless someone leaks lead in the production, which is a failure mode you can't avoid even with homegrown vegetables. Otherwise, there's only so much effort we'd want to expend over bullshit fear-mongering.
Oh, also, a funny thing: we tried early on to substitute the shop-bought pouches with DIY ones - making various forms of smoothies and sludges and putting them in reusable pouches. Guess what, neither of our kids would take more than one sip of anything we made like this. Not that I blame them - obviously anything home-made tastes like shit compared to commercial equivalent, and even a 1.5 y.o. is able to tell when you're trying to substitute something they want with a fake.
> Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries.
I wanted to say, "tell me you don't have kids without telling..." but I see you do, so let's use this as a reminder that parenting is high-variability occupation. We both have kids at the same age, and where for you this is a perfectly reasonable remark, it made me burst out laughing. I mean, 4 y.o. is the age where whenever two kids meet for more than 5 seconds, chances are they're sharing whatever food they have on hand...
I agree with a lot of what you said. It's easy to look at what I wrote and conclude: don't introduce pouches, easy. Be extremely deliberate in what you put on the table, easy.
I don't disagree with those things in concept. I'd love to execute a process every day that is perfection with respect to ingredient quality, time-spent, food consumed, etc. But I don't know a lot of people who somehow do all of this flawlessly - perhaps none in fact.
Also, what I didn't say is that you weigh what you want to control, how you want to impose rules with how much stress and anxiety you're willing to deal with in the process.
Suppose your kid cries for 30 minutes straight because they really want a pouch vs. chickpea pasta you've put in front of them. At some point, is that anxiety-inducing event worth it? Or, can you compromise sometimes with a pouch that helps everyone (kids, adults) get something they want.
> At some point, is that anxiety-inducing event worth it?
That's a very important question.
We've had a much easier time getting our younger daughter to eat proper meals at proper times than we had with our older one, and I think this was largely because we weren't as strict about it the second time around. Sure, she tasted some junk food a bit earlier than we'd like, but she also didn't get anxious about meal time like her older sister did at some point.
I know every kid is different and I don't blame parents for picky eaters, but kids pick up their habits of food at home very early, before they are old enough to get them at school or from other kids. My kids, who are older, have never heard of fruit pouches, and neither have I. If a kid won't eat what you put in front of them that's their temporary problem. Eventually, they will.
I know I had it easy. The first food my first child demanded was more broccoli. But I like to think that's partly because I put the broccoli on the table in the first place.
Eh, it's a fine theory but I have twins. One is the pickiest eater ever and getting her to eat is like an on-call sort of situation to be handled personally by mom or me. Her twin sister, these are 4 year olds, ate like 8 pieces of plain, steamed broccoli with her dinner last night. Her 2 year old brother is a great eater, too. The only difference (in routine and exposure to others) between the twin girls is that they're in different preschool classrooms. I've long suspected that she gets a lot of this behavior from other kids in her class.
As a parent one of the worst things you get to witness is your kids being assimilated into the machine. Nobody wants it. Many try to fight it. All will lose. We've all been assimilated into the machine to some extent.
My hope is that when my kiddo starts going to school that we can maintain eating relatively healthy stuff at our house by acknowledging that "junk" food (we're going to try to avoid that term so we don't assign morality to food) exists, and we can absolutely eat it, but that different foods make us feel differently, and eating too much of that kind of food can make you feel sick. I just hope it works.
We called it "party food": soda, chips, candy, cakes, etc. That's not regular food. You consume that at parties and even then don't eat too much - you'll get sick. My kids are adults now and they regulate themselves pretty well.
Toddlers can remain irrational longer than you can remain out of prison for starving them.
I had an extended period when I refused to eat anything at all except chocolate spread sandwiches. As an adult I'm not even sure where I would buy chocolate spread - is it near peanut butter? But my poor parents could either feed 4yo tialaramex chocolate spread sandwiches in that period or he'd go without food.
> Toddlers can remain irrational longer than you can remain out of prison for starving them.
Can I get this on a t-shirt to buy for every mom in my partner's mom group?? Jesus there is so much "you're giving your kids poison" type shaming in that group and it drives me nuts. It just stresses her out and doesn't help us out at all; we're lucky our kiddo eats just about everything (he loves frozen pancakes and applesauce pouches, but what can ya do?), so we just try to give him whatever we're eating. And we get so much flak for it. So what if the kid decides he wants to eat spaghetti four days in a row? It's calories in his body, which he needs a lot more than he needs fancy free-range blueberries picked under a full moon.
My first kid - great eater up until about age 1.5, then pandemic hits, and then everything became much more complicated for a variety of reasons.
My second kid - will eat really anything, but does show a preference for certain snacks which isn't surprising. But, also loves salmon, avocado, lentils.
My third kid (my wife - :) ) - A long-time carbs/cheese aficionado. Doesn't love a plate of broccoli or a bowl of lentils like I do.
I'm the strictest/healthiest eater by a large margin. At some point, you need some compromise in your system (my opinion, not suggesting for you)
I was VERY much in this camp. Worked great for two of my kids.
However, my third kid is absolutely willing to out-stubborn me on this one. She is a VERY picky eater (e.g., last night I had to fight with her to eat some food that she has eaten willingly before). If I let her she will simply go all day without eating rather than eating foods she doesn't want to eat. Not wanting her to be malnourished or develop an eating disorder, I pick my battles.
FYI you can make your own pouches at home! Buy reusable squeeze pouches online (fun styles and colors to entice the kid) and fill with whatever ingredients you'd like. My kid ate a mixture of store-bought and homemade throughout the pouch years.
Everyone who's saying "just don't introduce pouches..." either has the luxury of always being the child's caregiver or just hasn't gotten that far down the road. It's like frozen or fast food. At some point your kid will find out about it. Don't act like it doesn't exist, just offer a better alternative.
For all the shit we give Amazon, one thing I really appreciate about whole foods is that they have automated systems that will email you if something you bought is flagged as contaminated.
I got such an email for dried fruit that I bought for my toddler. I felt an indescribable amount of dread, because he ate a lot of it. We got him tested for lead levels and he came back fine, thankfully. In this case, it turned out that several samples in a batch came back elevated, and the recall was conducted out of caution.
I’m grateful that we take this stuff seriously, but we need to do better. It is abhorrent that contaminated products clear our existing tests and make their way to children.
What constitutes “fine”. Our daughter’s test went up 250% from the first test a year ago. The culprit seems to be cinnamon as she didn’t like cinnamon at 1 year, but at 2 years she’s more receptive to flavors
His pediatrician specifically ordered the test, examined it, and let us know we had nothing to worry about, so hopefully it wasn't that bad. All I know for now is that it was below the threshold you cited.
I'm sorry that that your daughter's test went up, I know that's soul crushing to see happen. When I was freaking out back when I got an email about contamination, I found a study that gave some perspective and made me feel a little better. Obviously for threshold of lead present in any food should be 0, and we should not be complacent, but look at the magnitudes for both the blood concentrations and deltas of IQ they're looking at here:
"A highly significant association was found between lead exposure and children's IQ (P < 0.001). An increase in blood lead from 10 to 20 micrograms/dl was associated with a decrease of 2.6 IQ points in the meta-analysis. "
Pretty much everyone picks food with heavy metals by taste. It's eve ("accidentally") added to e-cigarettes, to so that the people want to keep smoking.
Via Purcell International, via Austrofood SAS. Apparently Austrofood were using "cinnamon raw material" with elevated levels of lead.
But cinnamon is a flavouring agent, making up a small proportion of the pouch products. Lead salts taste sweet; cinnamon isn't supposed to taste sweet on its own. So I have to wonder how much lead was in these cinnamon "raw material"? This isn't the usual long-term lead poisoning you get from lead water-pipes; this was acute poisoning.
It seems to me more likely that Austrofood was using apples that weren't sweet enough, so somewhere in the supply chain some bozo added lead salts. People expect apples to be sweet, but not cinnamon.
It's Austrofood that makes these products, and bags them up in pouches. They started selling into the US market in 2019.
[Edit] Austrofoods started out farming "guanabana", a product I'd never heard of before today. Apparently it has a taste like apples and strawberries, with sour, citrus notes. It's texture is like bananas; so perhaps it's good for making apple sauce, if you sweeten it a bit, maybe with lead.
Lead salt is (unethically) compelling in cinnamon to make it more vibrantly colored. It's not being added as a sweetener, assuming it's being adulterated at all. The less unethical, but still harmful possibility is that leaded gas powered machinery is being used in/near the processing of this cinnamon and the exhaust particulate is contaminating the product. There have been cases of tea leaves being contaminated this way as they were driving a leaded gas powered truck back and forth over the leaves to help dry them with the wind.
Guanabana is quite sweet on its own. Certainly enough for kids. It's got a slight tang, but there's plenty of sugar.
Guanabana is an Annonaceae also called soursop. It is really good but it could also a dangerous thing to eat every day due to its annonacin (and related) content that can lead to neurotoxicity.
How? It takes a tremendous amount of lead to cause acute lead poisoning. That's not something that normally would occur from contamination or even intentional adulteration (like is done with tumeric).
The most worrying explanation would be that the seven kids who were diagnosed with acute lead poisoning were outliers in terms of the large amount of fruit pouches that they ate. If that was the case, how many other kids have been ingesting an amount of lead-contaminated fruit pouches too low to present acute symptoms, but high enough to cause them chronic damage by lead poisoning?
I wish in these cases that they would aggressively test products, in this case apple sauce cinnamon pouches from other manufacturers, and quickly publish data on what they find. I do not want to be in the dark on this when my kid’s health livelihood is on the line. I want to know which brands have been cleared.
>Over a three-month period, Mazumdar tested some of the country’s most popular spices – chilli, cumin, curry powder, garam masala and chat masala. She tested 52 samples of turmeric, assessing branded and packaged varieties, as well as loose powders sold by street vendors in Kolkata.
>She found lead in all of them.
>The cause, she found, was food colouring contaminated with compounds of lead. Lead chromate was added to the turmeric to brighten its golden colour and lead oxide gave the chilli powders a rich red hue.
It's one thing to add food coloring to improve the product's appearance. What boggles the mind is how there isn't anyone in the production facility who would raise the issue of lead being not the greatest food additive. I mean, these people are likely poisoning their own kids too. Are they this uneducated?
I suppose that muslims reject it because muhammad used galena powder as a medicine.
It might be an excuse, though. Their heavy metal content is likely why people started using spices in the first place. They can't taste good without them. Nothing can. We evolved to detect their presence, and like their taste.
> In its recall notice, Schnucks reported its supplier, Purcell International, notified it that "elevated levels of lead found in the cinnamon raw material used by Austrofood SAS, the manufacturer of the applesauce cinnamon pouches."
I worked in a Food Safety lab, most of our customers were businesses selling food products, but we did have someone that sent us a can of coke every few months for, I assume, his own piece of mind.
The panel of things you can test for is large, but not super cheap.
As an interesting aside regarding testing, in addition to food you can also test control points along the manufacturing process. For example, ultra-sensititve tests on sewer output that detect contaminants is a presumptive bad resultfor the material created since your last all-clear and you then identify what broke and what food isn't good. It some cases, for some contaminants at well-chosen control points, this is a much cheaper and just as reliable way of ensuring safe food.
Food safety is a huge industry. The teeth are generally only as sharp as the legal framework mandates but the capabilities are there on the testing side.
You think he would by a palette of coke and send one with the idea that its representative of the rest of the batch? ha did you ever see any anomalies in the coke tests?
Not sure his motivation. He may have been comparing different lab results against one another and using the coke as a standard (as insane as that sounds and only half jokingly).
I have no memory of what he was testing for, I did softwarw dev and wasn't running labs tests. I'm assuming if anything was weird, then we'd remember that. In the general case, it is routine and unremarakable to test safe food. You tend to only remember the anomalies.
It's such a big problem in India that the government there has a site full of simple home chemistry tests you can do after buying a spice. Most are as simple as what happens when you dissolve it in water.
I would expect factories to do batch testing as part of internal quality control. In fact, I know they do, with a lot of products, for a lot of problems. I wonder what went wrong here.
- "I would expect factories to do batch testing as part of internal quality control"
They generally do not!
- "The lack of regulation leaves much of the monitoring of heavy metal levels to companies. [Consumer Reports] contacted all the ones with products in our tests to see how they limited heavy metals."
- "Of the companies that replied to our questions—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Costco, Bolner’s Fiesta, Gebhardt, Litehouse, McCormick, Roland Foods, Spice Islands, Target, and Whole Foods—a few said they require their suppliers to have a program for controlling or testing for heavy metals. But only three—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Bolner’s Fiesta, and McCormick—specifically said they test products in their manufacturing plants for heavy metals."
Some high end products I buy will sometimes carry a link to a lab report quantifying the concentration of some critical component in that batch - curcumin in tumeric, for example, or polyphenols in olive oil - or highlighting the lack of such testing. Likewise, some supplements will bend over backwards to prove the purity of the product to consumers. But I guess only the super health nerdy market demands that. I don't imagine a typical consumer even reads the nutrition label.
The libertarian in me thinks Consumer Reports is enough for people who care. The liberal in me says if I wasn't health nerdy enough to navigate that hazard, it's a bit much to file under caveat emptor for random toddler mothers. I don't normally support regulation, but this seems like a worthy case.
As nanny state European. I think with goods such as baby food at least the possible inputs should be tested like spices used. They are likely getting quite lot of these delivered so testing for most common contaminants doesn't sound unreasonable...
Oh damn, I didn’t think about the cinnamon for some reason. It DOES make sense, we’ve all probably been reading stuff about spice contamination/adulteration, but I didn’t connect the dots.
The spice adulteration I (and probably other HN readers) am familiar with is turmeric, but there’s an obvious motive - make the spice more yellow. Was the cinnamon adulterated deliberately? If so, why? Color, like turmeric? Some trick to make harvesting easier (I know that cinnamon is one of those tricky spices, since you need to shave off curls of bark)? To make worse grade cinnamon seem like higher grade?
Lead can get into food if someone in the supply chain is trying to cheaply weigh down a product to make it feel heavier as if it has more food than it does. See lead in wine controversies.
You would have to put a lot of lead in food to make an appreciable difference in mass. Lead in wine, as I understand it, is about sweetness and preservation, not density.
I really do not think anyone is adding lead to food to increase the weight when you could use any metal compound with a roughly similar density like iron oxide (which even has an E-number) and thereby not obviously poison anyone for the sake a few grams and get yourself discovered immediately.
And if you wanted to weigh down the container, lead costs more then iron per kg: just make the existing iron-based can thicker.
No, the answer is because lead poisoning is really harmful (permanent, irreparable brain damage) and that makes the news. Nobody care about to much iron in food.
Also, lead is still in a lot of colors and pesticides. To cheap/useful.
wrt the title of the post: originally interpreted it as meaning "7/5 states," which was slightly amusing/confusing
wrt the content of the post: it really puts into perspective how much implicit trust is placed into the care and quality of purchased goods, yikes (in this particular scenario)
edit: the latter point is just an observation, not attempting to be cynical here lol
Look at the difference between an apple off a tree vs this "convenient serving size portion."
The apple from the tree is not far from the serving size; is already packaged, has had its contents filtered by a complicated mechanism with multiple means of arresting contamination or showing that it has happened. It's even got "tamper evident" protections.
Vs the pouch, which is composed of partly of intentionally inedible stuff. The food parts are how far from a tree? been through how many machines and transportation systems? The materials in a single pouch came from how wide a geographic area and had how many humans responsible for their integrity in that time?
It seems like an immense amount of tangential efforts and risk to go to, and the only real selling point of the pouches is that the consumer doesn't have to chew their food.
An apple from the grocery store can last upwards of a year before rotting. I.e. when you buy an apple, it's probably 10 months old, from what I've read. So if your reason for storing them is some doomsday scenario, there is no real advantage.
You can also freeze them or store them yourself in some jars, if you want to.
