[perihelions]

- "E.g., if I buy turmeric from Walmart or Whole Foods, can I safely assume that they're monitoring the product streams for lead?"

You can safely assume absolutely nothing.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29375003 ("Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead (consumerreports.org)") (2021)

- "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."

[zdragnar]

I've always wondered to what extent I've been doing myself a disservice by buying McCormick- surely the cheap powdered stuff isn't able to compete on flavor- but seeing this makes me glad my budget sense beats my foodie sense.

[TedDoesntTalk]

ConsumerLab tested many brands of both spice and supplement for lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury, and published the amounts they found in each brand:

https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/turmeric-curcumin-supple...

Paywall

[asdff]

What an article to put behind a paywall

[perihelions]

If you want food safety inspection results to be paywall-free, make your government do them.

[jorvi]

I don’t understand. If someone gets lead poisoning from regularly using a spiked batch of theirs, can’t they sue the everlasting piss out of these companies?

[autoexec]

It'd be impossible to prove that the poisoning was from the lead in any one manufacturers food. Lead contaminates everything around us. Americans have been spoon feeding lead and other heavy metals directly into the mouths of their infant children for ages (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/baby-food-toxins-government-rep...). Only recently has the FDA even come up with non-binding guidelines on how much poison companies can put into baby food.

The harm is cumulative, and so singling out any single company or product as the one who put you over the "tipping point" to some set of symptoms is next to impossible and any corporation you tried to take to court would likely have a team of high paid lawyers so good luck convincing a carefully selected jury.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to sue companies into the ground for mass poisonings, but even when we can prove a company poisoned us, AND can prove that they knew they were doing it, AND even when we can prove they tried to cover that fact up so they could make more money by doing it, companies haven't ever faced meaningful consequences. Not the tobacco industry, not DuPont, certainly not spice manufacturers.