When I was growing up, all the mothers passed around the same advice to not buy colorful Mexican pottery. We carefully avoided tempting pottery, so we figured that we were safe.
Well, it wasn’t true. Maybe the pottery did have lead, but the dishes, coffee mugs, old books, white lettering on modern glass baby bottles, toys, plastic measuring cups, La Creuset pans, and other common household items were chock full of a range of heavy metals.
Lead Safe Mama, Tamara Rubin, uses a super expensive XRF analyzer, so this is a huge service to all of us.
I never expected “premium” brands such as La Creuset to have lead and cadmium (super dangerous).
Plastic measuring cups, containers, and kid stuff is also contaminated.
A glum post for a Sunday. Sorry! I’ll do a cheerful one next.
After grandma passed, we kept some of her kitchen favorites. Every one of them was suspect, and I used a 3M lead check kit to test many (though, of course, it doesn’t detect cadmium and other heavy metals).
Fortunately, I knew what grandma would have done. I took a garbage bag, bid her things farewell, and took it to the dump (where they said to chuck it in with the regular trash, sadly, as there is no special section for contaminated kitchenware).
I now have many glass Ball jars of all sizes!
p.s. My Tiffany LEAD crystal wine glasses were also in that garbage bag. I just never thought about the “lead” in lead crystal before. It is the same crystal they use for children’s pendants. The wine glasses into which we had been drinking mildly acidic (wine) liquid, a substance that leaches materials from a container.
This is so true. In the old (Roman) days people knew exposure to lead was bad but it was so useful that it was considered OK if you took some care. I fished with lead weights as a kid and the first quantification of lead leaking out of crystal I saw was in the mid-90s. We put up with selling a lot of toxic things, as long as it makes them pretty or cheaper. Or both. And it can take a long time to notice the toxicity of a new chemical and longer for it to be regulated. That is why the more traditional things (e.g. plain wood, silver) are often safer.