>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.
