[freetime2]

> Yet adulterated turmeric looks like a major culprit almost everywhere, chiefly owing to poor practice in India, which produces 75% of the spice.

It’s really shocking to me that in the year 2023 people could be intentionally adding lead to food products at this scale. Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Ignorance? Distrust of modern medicine and health advice?

I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but the effects of poisoning people with lead just feel so much more direct and malicious.

[pseudo0]

It is reminiscent of the Austrian antifreeze wine scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_gly...

That was only a few wineries though, and it was pretty quickly caught and harshly punished. This is apparently a whole industry where the practice of poisoning consumers with lead is normalized.

[lqet]

> As a consequence of the scandal, a total of 27,000,000 litres of wine (corresponding to 36 million bottles or seven months' worth of Austria's total wine exports at the pre-1985 level) had to be destroyed by the West German authorities, which had confiscated or otherwise collected the wine. Doing this in an environmentally acceptable way proved challenging because DEG was incompatible with sewage treatment plants. In the end, the wine was disposed of and destroyed by being poured into the ovens of a cement plant as a cooling agent instead of water. In Austria, it was reported that the wine, mixed with other agents, was used as a road antifreeze in the particularly severe continental winter of February to March 1986.

According to the German Wikipedia, authorities in Austria first became suspicious when a small winegrower attempted to deduct large quantities of antifreeze from his taxes, although he only owned a single small tractor.

[Laforet]

On a related and lighter hearted note, back in the beginning of the 20th century the government of Hungary once mandated adding the pH indicator phenylphthalein to locally produced wine as a way to mark its origin for tax purposes. The compound is tasteless and clear at the acidic pH of wines, but would turn bright pink with some alkali added.

Sounds ideal right? However soon people started to complain that the wine gave them explosive diarrhea. Turns out that phenylphthalein is actually a potent laxative, just that nobody knew because it had never been given to such a large number of people in high doses. The wine were quickly withdrawn from the market and phenylphthalein remained a popular constipation medicine well into the 1980s before it was replaced by safer alternatives.

[hermitcrab]

I was at an all-boys boarding school in the 70s when a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing. They shut the whole school down until it reappeared (it was left on the windowsill of a teacher's house IIRC). No idea what the culprit was intending to do with it. Put it in the tea urn and try to make the whole school shit itself to death?

[hilbert42]

"...a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing"

Uh? What was the big deal? We had bottles of phenylphthalein in the school lab and no one cared a damn about it or whether any went missing because it was so commonly available and so cheap. And most of us had phenylphthalein at home in our medicine chests in name of Ford Pills. When TV ads told us to take it to 'keep fit and regular' it was just something one was used to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBPWt4OQ-RY

BTW, when I wanted an indicator at home for my chemistry set (in the days when they made 'real' sets with chemicals that actually did things) I just went to the medicine chest got the Ford Pills out and crushed them (they were a brownish color inside) but the additives usually weren't a problem, the indicator still worked fine.

[hermitcrab]

>What was the big deal?

I wasn't party to the decision making. But imagine the staff were a bit twitchy about what a malicious teenager could do with a whole bottle of the stuff. And what else they might do if they got away stealing the phenylphthalein.

[hilbert42]

When in the 70s?

I ask as there was a sudden shift in perception about the dangers of chemicals by the public sometime in the 1970s when worries were heightened (at least so in Australia where I was at the time but I think it occurred in many places). Perhaps it was this heightened concern that was responsible for the unnecessary worry over the stolen phenolphthalein.

What I've observed since my schooling in the 1960s is that worry about chemicals has definitely increased amongst the GP but unfortunately it has never been matched by a better understanding of chemistry. We often see this manifest in say overblown responses to incidents such as a spill of a relatively innocuous chemical, here both fear and perceived threat are not in keeping with actual reality. When all threats appear similar there's always the risk of not responding adequately to a situation that is actually very dangerous.

I'm glad my schooling was just before this change in thinking occurred because I had the chance to come in contact with materials that most school kids never see these days such as mercury, benzene, metallic potassium, sodium, lithium, white phosphorus, various —CN compounds, and we not only learned the equation for the black powder reaction but also we had to make the stuff and those who couldn't get it to explode failed the prac experiment. Also we had radioactive sources including metallic uranium of which discs were handed around the class to demonstrate its high density.

By today's standards that sounds like a dangerous free-for-all but it definitely was not. We were carefully and thoroughly instructed in the handling of chemicals including safety, storage, toxicity and having to recognize that certain types of chemicals were likely to be more toxic than others (even if we'd never encountered them previously then we should be especially wary of them due to the inherent characteristics of such compounds). Also much attention was paid to purity and why source was important (for instance, was the chemical lab or pharmaceutical grade).

On that last point we did an experiment where we even tasted certain reagents which I've not time to recount in detail here but it was the most important safety lesson about chemicals I was ever taught. Unfortunately, such is the fear of chemicals now that these days such experiments can never be done by school kids.

How is all this relevant to this story? It's simple really, even though I'd never learned about the toxic nature of lead chromate at school the training I had then would have made me acutely aware of its potential dangers even if I didn't know them specifically. Just the mention of lead chromate and food in the same sentence would have waved red flags even when I was a school kid! That it doesn't among some people nowadays is a real worry.

When it comes to toxicity some safety rules are dead simple—an organic compound containing a heavy metal is almost always toxic (and often very toxic). For instance, even if one had never come across them previously one could be almost certain that, say, lead acetate and methyl mercury would be toxic and you'd never want to encounter even small amounts in food. Also, much emphasis was placed on good lab practice and treating all chemicals as potentially dangerous especially those that were unknown or unlabeled.

I get really annoyed at stories like this turmeric-lead chromate one because whilst the world has become more aware of unwanted chemicals in our food and in the environment—which is a good thing—but, as mentioned, there hasn't been a corresponding improvement in understanding of the underlying chemistry by many of the public. This ignorance manifests as an overly strong fear of chemicals or just plain ignorance as in this turmeric story—or both. That all too many people are now frightened at the mere mention of the word 'chemical' is not helpful, it's very counterproductive and potentially dangerous.

That stories like this can still emerge in the 21st Century is worrying (same with your story about worries over stolen phenolphthalein) through the lack of basic chemistry knowledge is very disconcerting.

It seems to me that our approach to teaching chemistry to the GP is wrong in that we've been teaching it from the perspective that those taught will become chemists whereas it ought to be taught to provide a better general understanding of why the use of chemicals is essential in the modern world and that knowing how to both handle them safely and use them properly is of paramount importance.

An incident that happened to me some years back clearly illustrates what can happen when the heightened fear of chemicals amongst the GP combines with a profound lack of knowledge. During a meeting that I did not arrange and which I was not a central player about the banning of PVC wiring in houses an environmentalist said to me that "we [environments] will eventually get Element 17 banned altogether from everything."

Whenever I recount this odd encounter I substitute element's common/scientific name to Element 17 to highlight the sheer absurdity of such a notion, especially this element. Unfortunately, amongst some people zealotry and ignorance have combined to produce such utterances, but the trouble is that whilst this was an extreme case it nevertheless doesn't go unnoticed and ends up having a negative impact on the general discourse.

I was taught that chemistry is essential for the modern world to the function and not to be frightened of chemicals but rather to be mightily respectful of them and that to handle them properly requires some basic knowledge about chemistry.

We ought to be worried when more than a tiny minority can somehow deny the world—even food—is made of elements and chemicals and that all human-made chemicals are 'unnatural'. It's a sure indication that something isn't fully right with our education systems.

[jliptzin]

Interesting, when I was in school the preferred way to shut the school down was to call in a bomb threat from a pay phone

[hilbert42]

That's stupid and infantile and would get everyone offside. However there was one incident of notoriety that occurred about a year after I left school (so I take no credit for it nor would I've bothered) but the details weren't spared on me by someone who was still there.

We had a Kipp's generator (aka apparatus), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipp%27s_apparatus, in the school chemistry lab (it was a well equipped school with separate physics chemistry and biology labs). Anyway, the Kipp's generator was mainly used for making H2S and was used in a properly equipped fume cupboard with a decent exhaust.

During the last day of term (muck-up day for final year students) some bright sparks decided to remove the generator from the lab and stick it in the airconditioning ducts with the view of stinking the whole school out.

Trouble was the science wasn't well thought out, they'd not calculated how much H2S would be required to produce an objectionable effect. From what I gather the odor was so minimal that the perpetrators who were looking for the odor could barely detect it.

BTW, everyone at school was taught [as part of the curriculum] the dangers of H2S and that after a certain threshold concentration it anesthetizes the nose so one thinks the concentration has fallen and that is why it's so dangerous.

[hermitcrab]

Remember that this was a boarding school. We didn't get to go home, so there was no benefit to getting everything shut down. Also they were quite into using peer pressure via collective punishment.

[marcosdumay]

Vanishing fake blood?

I'm way more curious about the reason for the harsh reaction from the school.

[kazinator]

I remember doing titrations with that stuff in an organic chemistry course.

It's phenOlphthalein!

[crazygringo]

That's insane:

> Simple sweetening (also illegal) would not necessarily do the job since it would not sufficiently correct the taste profile of the wine. By using diethylene glycol (DEG), it was possible to affect both the impression of sweetness and the body of the wine. German wine chemists have stated that it is unlikely that an individual winemaker of a small winery had sufficient chemical knowledge to devise the scheme, implying that the recipe must have been drawn up by a knowledgeable wine chemist consulting for a large-scale producer.

> Most of the recalled wines contained up to a few grams of DEG per litre (and many only a fraction of a gram), which meant that dozens of bottles would have to be consumed in a limited period to reach the lethal dose of approximately 40 grams. However, in one record-setting wine (a 1981 Welschriesling Beerenauslese from Burgenland), 48 grams per litre was detected, which meant that the consumption of a single bottle could have been lethal. Also, long-term consumption of DEG is known to damage the kidney, liver, and brain.

> The industry's practice of DEG adulteration was traced back to Otto Nadrasky, a 58-year-old chemist and wine consultant from Grafenwörth, Lower Austria.

It boggles my brain that a professional chemist could recommend winemakers incorporate an actual poison into their wine. And it's not like this was some unknown substance -- it's literally the harmful chemical that was the impetus to found the FDA back in 1938! In a way, it's the poster child for a harmful adulterant [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%8...

[perihelions]

Or the carbon monoxide thing in the US (artificial colorant for supermarket meat):

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013... (pdf)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23958645

The common thread is that consumers buy whatever they think "looks fresh", so vendors optimize for that metric. (It's the wrong metric). Efficient markets, I suppose.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Efficient markets, I suppose. //

Isn't the Capitalist notion of efficiency bound with perfect information - we'd have to legislate to make sure that consumers know the product is 'laced with poison for the appearance of freshness; packaging contains carbon monoxide (CO) a deadly gas' and then see if the customers buy more of that product.

You're accusing consumers of optimising towards products _looking_ fresh, but the market isn't providing the information needed to also move away from 'purposefully laced with poison'.

I have an idea for a sort of reverse-trademark, an Origin Mark that allows a consumer to view all the inputs into a product and their geographic and legal origins. Then you can see 'this meat maker buys carbon monoxide', at least.

[perihelions]

No comment on economic theory, but on the carbon monoxide thing, the issue here isn't its toxicity, but that vendors use it to mask the color appearance of non-fresh, unhygienic meat. Naive visual assessment is wrong.

[AlexandrB]

I thought meat was more tasty/tender when it's "aged" for a while anyways.

[kadoban]

It has to be aged correctly to be safe.

[amrocha]

The point is that perfect information isn't real. Perfect information is the spherical cow in a vacuum of economics.

The incentives are such that vendors that lie and cheat do better than the ones that don't.

[hilbert42]

I lived in Austria for a while and have been aware of that story for a long while but it still perplexes me because I can't figure out why these idiots chose to use diethylene glycol, it was not only an irresponsible and dangerous choice but also it seems such a such a stupid one.

Di and ethylene glycol are both toxic and sweet which makes them risky chemicals to handle and store and that's been known since they were first used.

These greedy idiots should have known that. After all, they knew the chemicals were sweet and whenever the properties of di/ethylene glycol are mentioned the terms sweetness and danger/poisonous are bundled together so why didn't they know they'd likely kill their customers? (Fortunately, these days, the extremely bitter denaturant denatonium (Bitrex) is added to them stop consumption.)

Moreover, why didn't they use its closely related mate propylene glycol which is both sweet and non toxic and used in the food industry, it even has its own E number (E1521)?

The only reason I can come with is that propylene glycol isn't as sweet as its ethylene cousins. That said, it does provide that 'bulky' consistency or body that one finds in very sweet wines. BTW, PEG as it's known, is often painted onto cakes and pastries to give them that shine after baking.

[emmelaich]

And poisons added to henna for Westerners because they think normal brown henna tattoos are less genuine.

[thih9]

> That was only a few wineries though (…)

The article you linked shows it was more than that and that the country’s industry was affected.

[pseudo0]

Because of the practice of blending wines into other wines. So a few criminal wineries impacted orders of magnitude more blended wine production.

The distinction I was trying to draw was that unless there is a similar practice of blending for tumeric, this a systemic, widespread issue where the practice of poisoning customers has become normalized in the industry.

[thih9]

Do you have a source? I.e. on the number of criminal wineries and that the rest of the Austrian industry was unaware?

[HideousKojima]

Didn't realize that Simpsons episode was based on a real incident (though they depicted it in France, not Austria).

[MrBuddyCasino]

Not really comparable. The glycol is only ~4 times as damaging as the alcohol that wine contains anyway, and there were no known health issues triggered by it.

[vario]

don't you think by saying "there were no known health issues triggered by it" you are committing a statistical fallacy? Just because something has not bee observed does not mean it is not there....

[supriyo-biswas]

> Is this mainly due to greed and corruption?

Greed, since consumers are fooled into believing they're buying a fresher, more yellow product.

The Indian government has a webpage dedicated to detecting adulteration in various kinds of food, including turmeric[1].

[1] https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

[mdekkers]

Some of those additives are _wild_

[tety]

This talks about detecting it in whole turmeric, any way of doing so for powdered turmeric?

[netzego]

It's right there :)

`Test 15 : Detection of artificial colour in turmeric powder`

- [1] https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

[patja]

So you have to read between the lines and infer that "artificial colour" might be lead? Seems needlessly vague.

[consp]

It (lead acetate) was added to hair coloring products as late as 2022, while not meant for ingestion the risk is there (I don't know if it can get absorbed). It's still in many eyeliners and used to be present in lipstick in notable quantities. Not things you'd want it in.

[extraduder_ire]

Where is this and what was the impetus for banning it?

I am too used to being in the EU, and counting on RoHS and adjacent laws. So I don't really think about it most of the time, beyond reading labels.

[happytiger]

There is a great book on the subject called Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World by Dan Davies. It’s a great read and a lot of the discussion of the various factors that contribute to these types of scam behaviors and cultures and is definitely good reading, though the book is a little disjointed in how it’s written. But I recently listened to it out Audible and it was a fairly in depth discussion on the many factors that answer your exact question so I thought I’d share.

Here’s a good excerpt:

https://crimereads.com/why-just-about-every-country-seems-to...

The Canadian Paradox

Some places in the world are what they call “low-trust societies.” The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid, and people, rightly, fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the “high-trust societies,” conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high. With that in mind, given what we know about the following two countries, why is it that the Canadian financial sector is so fraud-ridden that Joe Queenan, writing in Forbes magazine in 1985, nicknamed Vancouver the “Scam Capital of the World,” while shipowners in Greece will regularly do multimillion-dollar deals on a handshake? We might call this the “Canadian Paradox.” There are different kinds of dishonesty in the world. The most profitable kind is commercial fraud, and commercial fraud is parasitical on the overall health of the business sector on which it preys. It is much more difficult to be a fraudster in a society in which people do business only with relatives or where commerce is based on family networks going back for centuries. It is much easier to carry out a securities fraud in a market where dishonesty is the rare exception rather than the everyday rule.

The existence of the Canadian Paradox suggests that there is a specifically economic dimension to a certain kind of crime of dishonesty. Trust—particularly between complete strangers, with no interactions besides relatively anonymous market transactions—is the basis of the modern industrial economy. And the story of the development of the modern economy is in large part the story of the invention and improvement of technologies and institutions for managing that trust. In other words, many things about the way the business world is organized make a lot more sense when you realize that they exist because of the constant drive for countries to become less like Greece and more like Canada.

[JaDogg]

This is a common practice. There are deception at every level. See my comments from before - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=JaDogg

[vasdae]

It's the result of a heterogeneous, low trust society - you don't care if you are killing someone who's not like you.

[coderedart]

why you gotta generalize a whole country like that? ever think of how an indian teenager might feel when they read your comment? Anyway, Adulteration is just simply ignorance and self-centered greed. People will indirectly harm anyone if it means making profits.

We have already seen this during Covid. That people will not follow safety practices like wearing masks and even rioting to remove the lockdown. Was it because the rioters lived in a heterogeneous low trust society? or did they want other races/castes to suffer?. It is just ignorance and not caring about other people if it means they themselves can lead a more convenient life.

I can also point to the current situation in Delhi https://indianexpress.com/article/india/delhi-aqi-today-seve... where they had to shutdown schools due to the severe air quality. Farmers in neighboring states burn stubble (remaining crop after harvesting) to prepare for the next crop immediately. This burning moves on to delhi and causes really really bad weather every year. burning stubble is a cheap and quick way to clear the farmland, and alternatives are expensive or unfeasible (lack of access to machinery). This is greed or poverty forcing them to do these things.

And OTOH, we have the judiciary which banned fireworks for almost 5 years now in Delhi, including the time of diwali (a festival known for fireworks) as right to quality air is now recognized as a fundamental right under right to life (and dignity). Now, we have people whining that this is stepping on the right to freedom of religion of Hindus, as the court is taking away fun crackers from Hindu children in the name of "western climate change". This is ignorance. They will literally let their own family breath the polluted air on next morning of diwali, because propaganda/politics has led them to believe that this is a coordinated attack on their religion. The people who suffer are older citizens or patients with respiratory problems.

[reducesuffering]

Should facts about a country be ignored because they paint it in a less positive light and some citizens might not feel great about that?

Only 16.7%, decreasing, of people in India think “most people in my country can be trusted.” However in Norway it’s 73.7%, increasing. Should we never talk about GDP per capita discrepancies? First step in addressing these issues is acknowledging there may be a problem.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attit...

[darth_avocado]

No but presenting something as a result of “low trust society” is just lazy. We have plenty of examples of what’s being accused of here in the US. Monsanto poisons the country with Roundup, Big Pharma poisons the country with addictive drugs, Fracking poisons drinking water for millions, etc. But somehow that’s never a result of a “low trust society” because it’s not in a developing country.

[horrible-hilde]

I think its about government regulation on food more than anything else.

[marcosdumay]

Do you really believe the GP's comment follows from that statistic you pointed out?

[mlinhares]

People often forget that developed countries have already done all that before becoming what they are today (the US itself has a very long history of poisoning its population for profit, both the private sector and the government): https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-t...

[horrible-hilde]

The food industry was the wild west back then. I remember reading about a study in the early 1900s where one company’s canned peas was found to have no actual peas in it. And Britain still has a bread minister (its now ceremonial) whose job ot was to ensure no additives in wheat like chaulk or plaster.

Without regulations you would have to depend on your local relationships or branding to make sure your food is clean. Globalization makes it easier to ignore the needs of others due to distance.

[rounce]

Do you have a link to a source with more info about this phenomenon?

[piva00]

Francis Fukuyama wrote a book about it, called "Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity". Even though it's the same Fukuyama who declared the end of history the book has some insights into the phenomena [1].

[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1996-0...

[rounce]

Thanks for this link, I grabbed the ebook for my flight today.

[AlecSchueler]

I doubt the assertion is based in anything other than conjecture.

[kossTKR]

Amazing to see primitive racism like this still pop up that can quickly be debunked by simply remembering for one second the hundreds of environmental catastrophes in the US (or Europe for that matter) done by companies for profit and zero compassion for either people or environment - many of them swept under the rug for years until areas become toxic waste dumps.

Thinking a few seconds more; what about a small group of people decimating the lives of millions of americans with opioids (Sackler), or entire industries lobbying for less regulation in foods? The EU banned additives list is way longer and they are healthier.

The problem is about profits, greed, regulation, and a bad form of capitalism where exploitation is outsourced or out of sight. Not about some "dumb people in some shithole somewhere".

[bhoops]

This comment is ignorant at best and racist at worst imo. Food adulteration is a common practice on ALL low income countries. India has a substantial population living with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world.

[gruez]

>Food adulteration is a common practice on ALL low income countries.

What's the correlation between low income countries and low trust countries?

[simonh]

https://ourworldindata.org/trust#:~:text=A%20Gini%20index%20....

>"A common way to get a first-order approximation of this relationship is to estimate the correlations between trust and GDP per capita. This visualization provides evidence of this correlation... As it can be seen, there is a very strong positive relationship. Most academic studies find that this relationship remains after controlling for further characteristics."

Trust is vital to maintaining healthy financial and business relationships. Contracts, loans, credit, cheques, post-paid billing, and much more all reduce friction and costs in an economy and depend on trust.

[nicoburns]

That article is interesting, but trust in institutions is probably just as important as trust in individuals and isn't really covered.

[Zufriedenheit]

One major factor is ignoring evidence based medicine. In India you can still commonly buy traditional medicines which have heavy metals like lead and mercury as ingredients.

[alephnerd]

Not ignored. EBM can be expensive or simply unavailable.

Aryuveda/Unani and Homeopathic Medicine is often the only form of "medicine" available for those in very poor areas.

Govt clinics and dispensaries might be overloaded and private healthcare is too expensive, so if you're a substinence farmer in eastern Uttar Pradesh or Bihar (let alone poorer areas across India), traditional medicines or homeopathic medicine is your only affordable choice.

Oftentimes the medicine provided is basically just steroids (they can make you feel better in the short term)

[easytiger]

> I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,

no it isn't

[hilbert42]

Right, it isn't. In fact, many potent greenhouse gasses such as many fluorocarbons are the least toxic of all chemicals (which was one of the their main virtues and why they were used).

Their problem is not toxicity but greenhouse warming - an altogether different mechanism.

[FrustratedMonky]

Every company has a layer of middle managers that need to meet budgets.

Basically, a layer of Eichmann's, that can be pushed into gassing people.

So adding lead to Turmeric is just one of dozens of deathly practices.