We may now know who’s behind the lead-tainted cinnamon in toddler fruit pouches
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Whilst obviously this is obviously a huge failure of food safety and testing, I cant help but think the constant shovelling of heavily processed foods into children's mouths, is an even bigger issue.
If your kids are hungry give them some fruit, not some horrible, ultra processed crap in a tube.
If your kids are hungry give them some fruit, not some horrible, ultra processed crap in a tube.
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For one, those items are not likely to cause serious harm the way lead is to people. Those would be far less serious violations than literally giving children lead poisoning.
Secondly, if they intentionally mislabel their products to get them imported into the EU then they deserve it. That is criminal. As long as they don't do that the EU isn't going to extradite anyone.
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Yes. No other infant mammal needs to eat food from a can or a tube.
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Does that mean it is okay to just let infants die instead? That is what happens with other mammals.
Or maybe the mother should eat their child, like some other mammals do.
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Who here is/was advocating the importing of baby formula from China into the United States because I certainly wasn't.
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I am not saying we shouldn't eat any preserved or even lightly processed foods but why in the hell are you feeding your child heavily sweetened, flavoured, preserved, fruit concentrate in a tube?
Buy some fruit or make them a sandwich.
This reliance on stuffing kids full of utter rubbish is pretty much the heart of the diet crisis in the USA.
Of course poor access and high prices of unprocessed foods and the blanket coverage of the country in ultra cheap Fast Food is the other.
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Definitely could help explain Ecuador and its struggle up out of the equatorial crime, violence and eco-mire if this is how its food chain is managed
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You should call for airstrikes. The issue here is the resellers, distributors, and importers were not doing testing and the factory was offshore and outside fda control. The fix here is obvious. Sample testing every box imported to standards we'd expect from a domestic producer. Start with 15% and if that goes well for a year drop to 10% and then 5% by year 5. They'll start small and ramp up to limit losses, but at least there is some oversight. That's the real issue here. The problem is this is exactly the sort of thing we bang on China for... Lol
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So you do recognize part of the problem yet still insist on flying the entitled elitism flag. Bravo I guess.
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It
It is likely that the sum of all “checks” the US companies did was require a worthless unenforceable piece of paper to be signed once a year or every few years stating they are complying with xyz regulations and quality audits from someone in the supply chain. Some admin in the US checked a box saying the piece of paper was received and onto the shelves it went.
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It blows my mind that we're getting spices (or food in general) from countries with minimal to non-existent quality control or government oversight. Are we that hard up for cheap food???
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If you look at the pictures in the article, you'll notice the pouches state "no sugar added" and "no artificial colors or flavors."
I found a picture of one nutrition label, which lists the ingredients as "Apple puree, cinnamon powder, acidulant: ascorbic acid." This lines up with similar fruit pouches from this vendor.
https://wanabana.com/fruit-pouch/
So not sweetened, not concentrated, not flavored (unless you mean the cinnamon), not preserved. This type of pouch was supposed to be the good type of convenience food for kids.
And convenience is a major thing. This is going to be served to kids, often on the go, like while in a car or something. The kids this is going to be served to may not be able to handle just eating a whole apple, and even with apple slices they may end up dropping a slice or to, etc. And serving applesauce in a cup with a spoon is another car mess waiting to happen. So putting the applesauce into a pouch the kids can easily just suck it out of with the absolute minimum risk for spills, even if it's dropped, has a strong appeal to parents, especially if the pouch seems to be as healthy as eating homemade applesauce.
You have a good point overall, but it falls flat when looking at these specific fruit pouches.
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Our regulatory system should be such that there isn't a difference in safety or nutrition between some apples and cinnamon that I blended up to avoid choking hazards and a convenient store bought pouch containing blended apples, cinnamon, and some ascorbic/citric acid as a preservative. If anything the store bought baby food should be better because of the opportunity to fortify the food with micronutrients.
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Um, cinnamon has always been imported. It doesn't grow in North America.
https://www.kew.org/plants/cinnamon
Granted, the "cinnamon" in those pouches was more likely cassia, but that doesn't grow in North American either:
https://www.nedspice.com/product/cassia/
Herbs and spices have always had specific geographic regions they can grow and thrive in, so global trade of it is pretty much inevitable.
Edit, now, what could happen is that we source some of the raw ingredients from foreign countries, but them test them as they arrive in bulk at the borders, then do the combining of the ingredients into a final food product in the US. But so far, companies have preferred outsourcing this to outside the US, because it's cheaper.
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And we wonder why the general population behaves the way it does? Sometimes people never even have a chance when the environment around them is so polluted their own body and specifically their brain does not become what it should have been. We live in a self inflicted, tragic world.
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I would have said that spices are among the few things that haven't doubled in price. Black pepper, maybe. But the ones I use fresh like garlic, ginger and chilies are actually cheap enough these days. Not sure about turmeric because I only buy it occasionally.
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Maybe we should be importing whole spices and processing them in the US where the FDA has jurisdiction instead of relying on Nega-Brands in other countries who'll just forge the paperwork about their testing processes.
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Considering a very popular yellow food coloring in the U.S. (mainly used to make literally all of our cheese look like cartoon cheese) has been banned in most the rest of the world, maybe it's high time the FDA took a closer look at food coloring agents in general and started banning a few.
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The lead chromate could have been added to restore the colour after adulterating the spice with some even cheaper adulterant. I remember an old case of red pepper being adulterated with reddish clay, and I can easily imagine that adding Chrome Orange to that would "fine‑tune" some of the "pepper" colour (thankfully it wasn't used there, IIRC).
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Which is a failure in policy that no one even knew our food had been contaminated until children started getting sick.
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purposelycryptic
Ars Praetorian
These are common products sold across the country, that were contaminated due to failures by the manufacturers.
Exactly how many supermarket chains have been shut down for selling listeria-contaminated vegetables? None. Because food distribution operates on a chain of trust, and you don't cut the last link for the failures of those in the first few.
Should stores stop stocking the products from the manufacturer, at the very least until they have fully overhauled their operations? Sure. But blaming a store simply for stocking food is just stupid.
That's why product recalls exist - because a bad product was distributed. Then you take the actual manufacturer down. Stop trying to shoot the messenger.
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Indeed, and critical to this... the way things are set up right now, we need these stores to stay open. I don't like that we're that reliant on this, but that is the reality, and so we can't just shut down every single store that sold this product. Lead's bad, starvation is worse.
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Seal Team 6 is for those times when we want someone to take credit for expiring someone.
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Half way through the second bag of Quaker Granola, I got a letter from Costco informing me that the Quaker factory has had an issue with E. coli in this production line, although there have been no reported cases of human illness. They invited me to return the material for a rebate. However, as three quarters of it, (and probably the previous double package) had not killed me, or anyone else we know of, I finished it off the package. So far it has not returned to the Costco shelves, so I am forced to the more "artisanal" (= twice as expensive) granola, which still contains the same level of added sugar. The 3x as expensive stuff does not contain added sugar, but at that price I am tempted to actually do the work and make it myself.
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Now that's a campaign slogan I could really get behind ;-)
While we are at it, how about a Raman one as well? There is this pretty neat handheld combined Raman/FT‑IR spectrometer retailing for only about $150,000.
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raschumacher
Ars Praetorian
Republican solution: Burn down the FDA so this never happens again! The Private Sector will take care of it!
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Imagine a world where we paid enough taxes to fund the agencies designed to PREVENT this.
Think of all the mega rich who are begging to be taxed more (not an exaggeration). A government that is responsible for doing its job, instead of mindless culture wars and proto fascism.
I'm so glad the republikkkan party has spent the last 30 years sabotaging government to prove that government doesn't work right...
Think of all the mega rich who are begging to be taxed more (not an exaggeration). A government that is responsible for doing its job, instead of mindless culture wars and proto fascism.
I'm so glad the republikkkan party has spent the last 30 years sabotaging government to prove that government doesn't work right...
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raschumacher
Ars Praetorian
Think, people, think! Without heavy metal poisoning where would we get the next generation of Republican voters??
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These wouldn't work, maybe unless you tested a pure sample of the actual adulterated spice.
IIRC EPA said that the cinnamon was found to contain ~1000-5000 ppm of lead or chromium, which might be hypothetically within the detection sensitivity of the common home paint lead tests (unless the natural colour of the spice interferes with reading the colorimetry results, as is often the case), but that obviously gets much diluted in the finished food product, way below any home test sensitivity – a sample of the final puree pouch had "only" 2 ppm of lead, which is pretty much undetectable by home methods (while still over 2000x the proposed maximum permissible in such foods).
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Instead, we have a world where giant corporations are, when these agencies eventually DO charge them with something, are now taking the strategy of threatening the very existence of these agencies by starting a lawsuit claiming they are unconstitutional. It's bad enough there's already been one case of an agency pulling back on their charges to avoid it heading to the supreme court.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhHjrC-MuCM
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Ultra processed? It's apple sauce. The brand we buy's ingredients are: "Apple, Apple Puree Concentrate, Lemon Juice Concentrate".
https://gogosqueez.com/products/fruits-vegetables/fruit-pouches/appleapple/
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Hold my beer!
Now I'll just have to get some photo multipliers, digitisers and most importantly, 100% 14C flour as the β‑ noodle source.
Ramen‑β‑induced fluorescence spectrometry, here we come!
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Yep, It's a race to the bottom so it's going to keep on keeping on.
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