Tainted cinnamon applesauce pouches that have sickened scores of children in the U.S. may have been purposefully contaminated with lead, according to FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods Jim Jones.
....The agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have collaborated with state and local health authorities as well as Ecuadorian authorities to trace the origin of the cinnamon in the applesauce pouches, which is believed to be the source of the lead contamination.
The FDA believes this wasn't just a matter of poor hygiene at the factory. The lead was deliberately added to the cinnamon. They say it was "economically motivated," a way of making the cinnamon cheaper.
This is remarkable. A pouch of applesauce contains something like one gram of cinnamon, which costs less than a quarter of a cent on the global market. But it's cheaper to use less cinnamon and make up the weight with lead?
What's even worse is that the FDA suspects this is a routine practice—but only for cinnamon shipped to poor countries. It was only caught this time because the cinnamon supplier screwed up and accidentally delivered a tainted batch for applesauce that was destined for the US, where we have the ability to detect lead contamination. Everyone else is out of luck.
The only thing left now is to figure out if the applesauce manufacturer is shocked by this or "shocked" by it. After all, how would the cinnamon supplier know which batch was going where unless they had the connivance of the applesauce maker?
Consumer Reports has been finding elevated lead and other toxic metals in a wide variety of spices and other foods. Like Rice and Dark Chocolate.
Note that lead is very dense, so you wouldn't need to add "much" to make your cinnamon shipment weigh like it was more.
Both plants that concentrate heavy metals. Arsenic in brown rice is an issue...
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/arsenicandyou/arsenic-in-rice-and-rice-products/
I just got paid 7268 Dollars Working off my Laptop this month. And if you think vx02 that’s cool, My Divorced friend has twin toddlers and made 0ver $ 13892 her first m0nth. It feels so good making so much money when other people sb03 have to work for so much less.
This is what I do.....................> > > https://careersrevenue123.blogspot.com/
and turmeric, which is being used not just for cooking. but in capsules as a health supplement
Exactly.
Very highly reminiscent of the Chinese melamine scandals:
“Background A major food safety incident in China was made public in September 2008. Kidney and urinary tract effects, including kidney stones, affected about 300,000 Chinese infants and young children, with six reported deaths. Melamine had been deliberately added at milk-collecting stations to diluted raw milk ostensibly to boost its protein content. Subsequently, melamine has been detected in many milk and milk-containing products, as well as other food and feed products, which were also exported to many countries worldwide.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2799451/
I remember being really pissed off at China over the melamine scandal, and about 2 days later there was a whole 'nother story about an American peanut butter manufacturer who got some salmonella in a big batch of peanut butter and who shipped it out anyway because he didn't want to eat the cost of tossing the batch.
I was pissed because my dog got poisoned by it. She didn’t die, but the vet said it damaged her kidneys and would likely take a few years off her life.
I later read about it poisoning children too. Apparently the culprits were executed. So, maybe yea China?
Melamine contains nitrogen, which is used as an indicator in determining protein levels. Adding melamine is cheaper than adding protein.
Also reminiscent of the Chinese baby formula scandal where poisonous ethylene glycol (antifreeze) was used as a sweetener in place of sugar.
capitalism's prime directive: maximize profits
corollary: low-level managers are cheap and fit quite comfortably in a small cell
Lead tastes like cinnamon?
Adulteration aimed at poor countries with little recourse is depressing, but not surprising. I remember an Indian pharma manufacturer went bust a while back because they found out that the generics they'd been making for Africa were garbage - and had record of some of the executives saying "Who cares? It's only blacks dying".
Lead, or at least lead acetate (aka Sugar of Lead) tastes sweet. Might not add to the cinnamon flavor, but it would definitely add to the weight. And I presume cinnamon is purchased by weight, not by some kinda flavor unit?
The Third Man, Ferris Wheel Scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21h0G_gU9Tw
Lead-adulterated turmeric is a big problem in SW Asia...
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/09/24/lead-found-turmeric/
I wonder if they checked for Chromium contamination as well - it is also rather poisionous. The Tumeric was contaminated with Lead Chromate, a poisionous pigment that improved the appearance of the ground tumeric. The color match for Lead Chromate and cinnamon is not a good match - too yellow, They could have also added Mercuric Sulfide - a very poisionous red pigment, but we didn't hear of Mercury poisioning as well. But it certainly indicates a need for much more thorough testing.
Probably just metallic lead powder; cinnamon is already dark in color.
One wonders if there's a correlation between leaded cinnemon and violence within societies worldwide.
People responsible for adulterating food products like this should be charged with attempted murder.
A couple years ago ConsumerLab did a report on cinnamon supplements and included five cinnamon cooking spices,
https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/cinnamon-supplements-review/cinnamon/
Wasn't there some kind of youtube craze a few years back where kids would video themselves swallowing spoonfuls of cinnamon power? The "Cinnamon Challenge"? Followed of course by choking, caughing, barfing, and maybe calling 911.
Fun.
This is exactly how we end up with what Republicans call "too much regulation".
1. Total shitbag does something awful.
2. Gets caught.
3. We create regulation to keep the next shitbag from doing the same thing.
Wash, rinse, repeat. If it were not for bad actors, we wouldn't need this much regulation.
And, sorry Libertarians, dead/maimed people/animals/environment do not herald "the market taking care of it" fast enough.
Local legend says the big freighters taking wheat to Asia are allowed certain fraction of the weight to be dirt and water. If it's too clean they'll pipe in dirt and water until they are just under the limit.
Man oh man, some people are really awful.
Lead is really easy to detect by XRF. The lead K-line is very high energy, about 75keV, making it very penetrating. At incoming inspection they could fluoresce the sample with a high energy tube and look for this signal. It is so penetrating they could look right through the packaging and cardboard box containers.
I doubt seriously it is for the weight. More likely for the sweetness.
This happen some years ago with dog food. Ingredients sourced from a particular company in China were contaminated with melamine and hundreds of dogs died across North America. Melamine was probably added because it gave a false positive on the protein tests of the time, so it made a low quality source material test like a high quality one.
Even though we know exactly which company and exactly who was in charge of that company, no one was ever punished. In China, that likely means party connections.
It hit almost every brand of food in the store because most of those brands are just shelf space for the same 2 or 3 companies.
Since then, I haven't fed my dogs anything for which the company is not able to give me a straight answer on where they source their raw materials, and it had better be a western country where there are strong testing and regulatory regimes.
Add to that the more recent concerns over boutique grain-free foods leading to dilated cardiomyopathy, and basically the only country I could identify that scored well on both dimensions was Hill's. No association with dcm and the least western country they source from is lamb meal from New Zealand. I think we can trust the Kiwis.
That's a long winded way of saying it is probably a way to make the cinnamon look like something it isn't than a way to simply add mass. There are simpler, cheaper, less detectable and safer ways to add mass if that is what you want.
Spices it's generally for weight.
Because Profits! Gotta have Profits. Gotta Have Ever Increasing Profits. Gotta Have Exponentially Ever Increasing Profits. Amen, Profits without End.
This from Credo and Greatest Good of the 21st Century.
Lead chromate is added to turmeric to give it the fancy yellow color. Low quality turmeric has poor color. I'll bet the same thing is happening with cinnamon, they want to make the color look right so it will actually sell. I highly doubt at actual lead metal is getting added.
> The only thing left now is to figure out if the applesauce manufacturer is shocked by this or "shocked" by it.
I expect there are different supply chains that hook up at the cinnamon-supplier end, and a cheap batch went into the premium pipeline. The more 3rd parties who are customers to the supplier, the less plausible it is that the US end of the supply chain knows anything about the other supply chains. Until this happens. What you'd hope is that Applesauce Corp. will be looking for another cinnamon supplier, one who can be counted upon to not ship contaminated product.