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by gruez
918 days ago
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The amount of ill-gotten gains from adulterating/bulking up your product is directly proportional to its value by mass. An applesauce pouch weighs like 100g and costs $1 each, so you'd expect to get $10 per kg of lead added. Meanwhile cinnamon costs $30/kg, so it's roughly 3x as profitable. Of course, this assumes the lead is free, which isn't the case, but that actually makes adulterating cinnamon even more profitable by comparison. For instance if lead costs $5/kg, then you'd make $5/kg of profit on the applesauce vs $25/kg on the cinnamon, making it 5x as profitable. |
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And then but in order to bulk it up by even a percent, you're quickly into "holy shit" concentrations. 500ppm is above the highest level detected by the Stanford turmeric study and would only get you 3 or 4 grams of extra mass per litre (say 0.5% change). I don't know where the Equadorian standards are but Indian food standards, in the news for similar scandals, are 2.5ppm for some spices and the EU version for bark spices is 2.0ppm. To get to a percent in mass change, that's like 3 orders of magnitude more.
I don't doubt you can increase the density. I do doubt you can do it at a macroscopic level and not expect someone to notice at some point that a percent of the product is now pure lead. Maybe they're just that stupid, or they only had lead compounds in the building, but cutting food with multiple grams/kg an easily-detected, insoluble neurotoxin, harmful in the low microgram/dl ranges, for the sake of a percent ish mass increase seems completely mad even by criminal standards. Why not just add sawdust (which is what cinnamon basically is) and sell 101 kg rather than 100? Even if you have to adulterate for density, there are plenty of fairly inert heavy things, purchasable in bulk, that you could use that won't set of alarms the moment a lead testing strip comes out of a packet (not that that happened, early enough, apparently).
Maybe it's for colour in which case it makes sense: you don't get that with sawdust or iron oxide, >5g/cm³, nearly as dense, or whatever. But I can't imagine they're deliberately making an appreciable change in the bulk density of the cinnamon.