Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any risk of getting those elements in them if you grow them yourself, through the soil, water, fertilizer, products or the seeds?
what about hydroponics
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Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
51–60 of 134 posts
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#52> Grow and dry your own. That might be a particularly good idea if you use a lot of basil
Growing your own food to avoid heavy metals is actually horrible advice. To be done safely you need to get your soil tested; especially in more urban areas your soil is often just as bad or worse than the soil these were grown in.
Remember, burying used motor oil after an oil change rather than recycling it was common practice late into the twentieth century.
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#53The cumulative increase in anxiety this article is likely to cause is going to drown out the negative health effects of the elements themselves.
I'm all for cleaning up production, our food, and all the rest. But trying to make everyone afraid of everything, all the time, is not actually helpful.
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The good news is both of them are easy to grow indoors or outdoors, and they're perennial. Perennial herbs include rosemary, lavender, marjoram, tarragon, sage, mint, parsely, lemon balm, chives, sorrel, yarrow, chicory, savory, bay laurel, lovage, hyssop, anise, chamomile, bergamot, alfalfa, clover... the list goes on. You can use them fresh, or make your own dried herbs. On top of that, variants of thyme work as a…
A tangential word of warning for anybody feeling inspired to DIY some fresh herbs: mint spreads very aggressively. If you want to plant some, put it in a pot on a patio or pavement to stop it from getting into the ground. If you do not, in a few years you'll have mint growing absolutely everywhere.
You say that like it is a bad thing...
Mostly kidding, I grew up living at a rural property that had mint all over the place. I loved it, but I do understand how much trouble invasive plants can cause.
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#55I hate this. I’m up to my eyeballs trying to keep my newborn away from all the toxic shit that’s in every part of his life, BP* in plastics, flame retardants in clothes and mattresses and rugs, heavy metals in baby food and now in herbs, micro plastics in food, radioactivity and mercury in farmland around coal fired power plants, etc etc etc. The negative externalities on dangerous chemicals is so very high; what am…
> ...what am I supposed to do, test my fucking pepper? I think a large part of the USA keeps electing politicians whose philosophy seems to be absolutely that – you "get the choice" to test your pepper or not, and market forces will eventually drive out the bad pepper companies. This can be backed up by the fact that one of the past administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency was a thinly veiled oil and gas…
I know there's a lot to be said about $POLITICIANS and $POLICY generally, but somehow I don't think there's any big-oil type conspiracy to prevent the FDA from checking for heavy metals in spices, specifically. Did they check for them in the more regulation-on environment of the Clinton administration? The Obama administration? Might there be more nuance than "regulations on!" "regulations off!?"
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#56I hate this. I’m up to my eyeballs trying to keep my newborn away from all the toxic shit that’s in every part of his life, BP* in plastics, flame retardants in clothes and mattresses and rugs, heavy metals in baby food and now in herbs, micro plastics in food, radioactivity and mercury in farmland around coal fired power plants, etc etc etc. The negative externalities on dangerous chemicals is so very high; what am…
The kids have always been exposed to this stuff, it's unavoidable. Focus on the big wins and don't worry about the small stuff - law of diminishing returns. Eliminating ppb of lead isn't going to move the needle versus getting your kid immunized. You'll drive yourself crazy otherwise.
The small stuff bioaccumulates and fucks with your endocrine system.
If you have kids, one of the best things you can do for them is work towards the dismantling of Western civilization and establishment of a permaculture-based society.
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kids have always been exposed to this stuff, it's unavoidable. Focus on the big wins and don't worry about the small stuff - law of diminishing returns. Eliminating ppb of lead isn't going to move the needle versus getting your kid immunized. You'll drive yourself crazy otherwise.
The small stuff bioaccumulates and fucks with your endocrine system. If you have kids, one of the best things you can do for them is work towards the dismantling of Western civilization and establishment of a permaculture-based society.
The resulting decline in the number of people that can be fed at one time might not be as great for your kids.
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#58The cumulative increase in anxiety this article is likely to cause is going to drown out the negative health effects of the elements themselves. I'm all for cleaning up production, our food, and all the rest. But trying to make everyone afraid of everything, all the time, is not actually helpful.
Nobody's going to clean anything up unless they feel like it's worth paying attention.
Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#59Here's the hazard values sorted by brand, for brands with 3 or more products listed:
["365 Whole Foods Market", [0, 0, 0, 1, 1]]
["Badia", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
["El Guapo", [0, 0, 0]]
["Great Value", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
["Happy Belly", [0, 0, 3]]
["Kirkland Signature", [0, 0, 1]]
["La Flor", [0, 0, 1, 3, 3]]
["McCormick", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
["Morton & Bassett", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
["Penzeys Spices", [0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]
["Sadaf", [0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]
["Simply Organic", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]
["Spice Islands", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2]]
["Tone’s", [0, 1, 2]]
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(File.open(ARGV[0]).read)
doc.xpath('//div[@class="OneWholeSpice"]').map do |nd|
spice = nd.xpath('div[@class="spiceTitleBar"]').first.inner_text
# workaround for one missing
nd.xpath('//div[@class="OneWholeSpice"]').each {|nd| nd.remove}
brands = nd.xpath('.//ul[@class="spBrand"]/..').each do |nd|
brand = nd.xpath('.//span[@class="sbCopybld"]').first.inner_text.strip
rating = nd.xpath('.//div[@class="noReccommendCircle"] | .//div[@class="noReccommendCircleKey"]').length
puts "\"#{spice}\",\"#{brand}\",#{rating}"
end
endRe: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty easy to grow your own, from seed even, but most plant nurseries will have these in their herb section.
It's not clear where the heavy metals are coming from. One possibility mentioned in the article is the soil itself. I wonder if even potting soil is tested for heavy metals? If heavy metals get through whatever food testing is done by the FDA, McCormick, etc., I don't have great confidence that soil testing is any better. That said, I would think growing your own is safer.
The reason for these is probabaly the extreme depths from which water is pumped. The normal shallow ground waters arent this bad with arsenic I would assume.