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> Yet adulterated turmeric looks like a major culprit almost everywhere, chiefly owing to poor practice in India, which produces 75% of the spice. It’s really
by freetime2 3y ago
> Yet adulterated turmeric looks like a major culprit almost everywhere, chiefly owing to poor practice in India, which produces 75% of the spice.
It’s really shocking to me that in the year 2023 people could be intentionally adding lead to food products at this scale. Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Ignorance? Distrust of modern medicine and health advice?
I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but the effects of poisoning people with lead just feel so much more direct and malicious.
- JaDogg 3y agoThis is a common practice. There are deception at every level. See my comments from before - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=JaDogg https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=JaDogg
- pseudo0 3y agoIt is reminiscent of the Austrian antifreeze wine scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_glycol_wine_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_gly... That was only a few wineries though, and it was pretty quickly caught and harshly punished. This is apparently a whole industry where the practice of poisoning consumers with lead is normalized.
- lqet 3y ago> As a consequence of the scandal, a total of 27,000,000 litres of wine (corresponding to 36 million bottles or seven months' worth of Austria's total wine exports at the pre-1985 level) had to be destroyed by the West German authorities, which had confiscated or otherwise collected the wine. Doing this in an environmentally acceptable way proved challenging because DEG was incompatible with sewage treatment plants. In the end, the wine was disposed of and destroyed by being poured into the ovens of a cement plant as a cooling agent instead of water. In Austria, it was reported that the wine, mixed with other agents, was used as a road antifreeze in the particularly severe continental winter of February to March 1986. According to the German Wikipedia, authorities in Austria first became suspicious when a small winegrower attempted to deduct large quantities of antifreeze from his taxes, although he only owned a single small tractor.
- Laforet 3y agoOn a related and lighter hearted note, back in the beginning of the 20th century the government of Hungary once mandated adding the pH indicator phenylphthalein to locally produced wine as a way to mark its origin for tax purposes. The compound is tasteless and clear at the acidic pH of wines, but would turn bright pink with some alkali added. Sounds ideal right? However soon people started to complain that the wine gave them explosive diarrhea. Turns out that phenylphthalein is actually a potent laxative, just that nobody knew because it had never been given to such a large number of people in high doses. The wine were quickly withdrawn from the market and phenylphthalein remained a popular constipation medicine well into the 1980s before it was replaced by safer alternatives.
- hermitcrab 3y agoI was at an all-boys boarding school in the 70s when a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing. They shut the whole school down until it reappeared (it was left on the windowsill of a teacher's house IIRC). No idea what the culprit was intending to do with it. Put it in the tea urn and try to make the whole school shit itself to death?
- marcosdumay 3y agoVanishing fake blood? I'm way more curious about the reason for the harsh reaction from the school.
- jliptzin 3y agoInteresting, when I was in school the preferred way to shut the school down was to call in a bomb threat from a pay phone
- hermitcrab 3y agoRemember that this was a boarding school. We didn't get to go home, so there was no benefit to getting everything shut down. Also they were quite into using peer pressure via collective punishment.
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- perihelions 3y agoOr the carbon monoxide thing in the US (artificial colorant for supermarket meat): https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/CO-treated-meat-08.pdf https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2013... (pdf) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23958645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23958645 The common thread is that consumers buy whatever they think "looks fresh", so vendors optimize for that metric. (It's the wrong metric). Efficient markets, I suppose.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago>Efficient markets, I suppose. // Isn't the Capitalist notion of efficiency bound with perfect information - we'd have to legislate to make sure that consumers know the product is 'laced with poison for the appearance of freshness; packaging contains carbon monoxide (CO) a deadly gas' and then see if the customers buy more of that product. You're accusing consumers of optimising towards products _looking_ fresh, but the market isn't providing the information needed to also move away from 'purposefully laced with poison'. I have an idea for a sort of reverse-trademark, an Origin Mark that allows a consumer to view all the inputs into a product and their geographic and legal origins. Then you can see 'this meat maker buys carbon monoxide', at least.
- perihelions 3y agoNo comment on economic theory, but on the carbon monoxide thing, the issue here isn't its toxicity, but that vendors use it to mask the color appearance of non-fresh, unhygienic meat. Naive visual assessment is wrong.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoNot really comparable. The glycol is only ~4 times as damaging as the alcohol that wine contains anyway, and there were no known health issues triggered by it.
- vario 3y agodon't you think by saying "there were no known health issues triggered by it" you are committing a statistical fallacy? Just because something has not bee observed does not mean it is not there....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thih9 3y ago> That was only a few wineries though (…) The article you linked shows it was more than that and that the country’s industry was affected.
- pseudo0 3y agoBecause of the practice of blending wines into other wines. So a few criminal wineries impacted orders of magnitude more blended wine production. The distinction I was trying to draw was that unless there is a similar practice of blending for tumeric, this a systemic, widespread issue where the practice of poisoning customers has become normalized in the industry.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thih9 3y agoDo you have a source? I.e. on the number of criminal wineries and that the rest of the Austrian industry was unaware?
- crazygringo 3y agoThat's insane: > Simple sweetening (also illegal) would not necessarily do the job since it would not sufficiently correct the taste profile of the wine. By using diethylene glycol (DEG), it was possible to affect both the impression of sweetness and the body of the wine. German wine chemists have stated that it is unlikely that an individual winemaker of a small winery had sufficient chemical knowledge to devise the scheme, implying that the recipe must have been drawn up by a knowledgeable wine chemist consulting for a large-scale producer. > Most of the recalled wines contained up to a few grams of DEG per litre (and many only a fraction of a gram), which meant that dozens of bottles would have to be consumed in a limited period to reach the lethal dose of approximately 40 grams. However, in one record-setting wine (a 1981 Welschriesling Beerenauslese from Burgenland), 48 grams per litre was detected, which meant that the consumption of a single bottle could have been lethal. Also, long-term consumption of DEG is known to damage the kidney, liver, and brain. > The industry's practice of DEG adulteration was traced back to Otto Nadrasky, a 58-year-old chemist and wine consultant from Grafenwörth, Lower Austria. It boggles my brain that a professional chemist could recommend winemakers incorporate an actual poison into their wine. And it's not like this was some unknown substance -- it's literally the harmful chemical that was the impetus to found the FDA back in 1938! In a way, it's the poster child for a harmful adulterant [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%80%93_The_Massengill_incident_(United_States) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%8...
- emmelaich 3y agoAnd poisons added to henna for Westerners because they think normal brown henna tattoos are less genuine.
- HideousKojima 3y agoDidn't realize that Simpsons episode was based on a real incident (though they depicted it in France, not Austria).
- hilbert42 3y agoI lived in Austria for a while and have been aware of that story for a long while but it still perplexes me because I can't figure out why these idiots chose to use diethylene glycol, it was not only an irresponsible and dangerous choice but also it seems such a such a stupid one. Di and ethylene glycol are both toxic and sweet which makes them risky chemicals to handle and store and that's been known since they were first used. These greedy idiots should have known that. After all, they knew the chemicals were sweet and whenever the properties of di/ethylene glycol are mentioned the terms sweetness and danger/poisonous are bundled together so why didn't they know they'd likely kill their customers? (Fortunately, these days, the extremely bitter denaturant denatonium (Bitrex) is added to them stop consumption.) Moreover, why didn't they use its closely related mate propylene glycol which is both sweet and non toxic and used in the food industry, it even has its own E number (E1521)? The only reason I can come with is that propylene glycol isn't as sweet as its ethylene cousins. That said, it does provide that 'bulky' consistency or body that one finds in very sweet wines. BTW, PEG as it's known, is often painted onto cakes and pastries to give them that shine after baking.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago> Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Greed, since consumers are fooled into believing they're buying a fresher, more yellow product. The Indian government has a webpage dedicated to detecting adulteration in various kinds of food, including turmeric[1]. [1] https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/ https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/
- consp 3y agoIt (lead acetate) was added to hair coloring products as late as 2022, while not meant for ingestion the risk is there (I don't know if it can get absorbed). It's still in many eyeliners and used to be present in lipstick in notable quantities. Not things you'd want it in.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoWhere is this and what was the impetus for banning it? I am too used to being in the EU, and counting on RoHS and adjacent laws. So I don't really think about it most of the time, beyond reading labels.
- easytiger 3y ago> I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, no it isn't
- hilbert42 3y agoRight, it isn't. In fact, many potent greenhouse gasses such as many fluorocarbons are the least toxic of all chemicals (which was one of the their main virtues and why they were used). Their problem is not toxicity but greenhouse warming - an altogether different mechanism.
- vasdae 3y agoIt's the result of a heterogeneous, low trust society - you don't care if you are killing someone who's not like you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bhoops 3y agoThis comment is ignorant at best and racist at worst imo. Food adulteration is a common practice on ALL low income countries. India has a substantial population living with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world.
- gruez 3y ago>Food adulteration is a common practice on ALL low income countries. What's the correlation between low income countries and low trust countries?
- simonh 3y agohttps://ourworldindata.org/trust#:~:text=A%20Gini%20index%20of%200,report%20lower%20levels%20of%20trust https://ourworldindata.org/trust#:~:text=A%20Gini%20index%20.... >"A common way to get a first-order approximation of this relationship is to estimate the correlations between trust and GDP per capita. This visualization provides evidence of this correlation... As it can be seen, there is a very strong positive relationship. Most academic studies find that this relationship remains after controlling for further characteristics." Trust is vital to maintaining healthy financial and business relationships. Contracts, loans, credit, cheques, post-paid billing, and much more all reduce friction and costs in an economy and depend on trust.
- nicoburns 3y agoThat article is interesting, but trust in institutions is probably just as important as trust in individuals and isn't really covered.
- thlt 3y ago[dead]
- Zufriedenheit 3y agoOne major factor is ignoring evidence based medicine. In India you can still commonly buy traditional medicines which have heavy metals like lead and mercury as ingredients.
- ta_vf7xjd34cc 3y ago[flagged]
- infecto 3y agoWhat does ingesting mercury or lead fight against? While I understand modern medicine does sometimes use things that are toxic, it usually in net fixes what was needed. What does lead and mercury help with when eaten?
- ta_vf7xjd34cc 3y ago> What does ingesting mercury or lead fight against? This is a question for those who are experts in the field of Rasa Shastra.[1][2] Just like questions regarding which poisons/toxins are injected into the human body as treatment, why, and for which illness are questions for experts in the appropriate specializations of modern medicine. [1] A Text Book Of Rasa Shastra(Iatro-Chemistry And Ayurvedic Pharmaceutics) (https://chaukhamba.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=109 https://chaukhamba.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&pro...) [2] Introduction to ‘Rasashaastra’ the Iatrochemistry of Ayurveda (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3252715/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3252715/)
- infecto 3y agoNo I don't think it is the same. It easily comes to mind that most treatments of radiation while toxic to the body are used to kill types of cancer. If you are going to say this practice of eating lead and mercury for medicinal purposes is useful, I would think there would be at least a use that comes to mind that you could share instead of books. I don't think most traditional medicine practices are very useful. Similar to strict religious teaches of what food to eat, Catholic, Jewish, Sattvic diet even. They served a purpose when conceived, perhaps have interesting things that could benefit us today but in a whole. There may be an interesting herb or compound that is actually useful but usually the vast majority of it is either a placebo, damaging to the user or damaging to the environment.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoEvery company has a layer of middle managers that need to meet budgets. Basically, a layer of Eichmann's, that can be pushed into gassing people. So adding lead to Turmeric is just one of dozens of deathly practices.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- happytiger 3y agoThere is a great book on the subject called Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World by Dan Davies. It’s a great read and a lot of the discussion of the various factors that contribute to these types of scam behaviors and cultures and is definitely good reading, though the book is a little disjointed in how it’s written. But I recently listened to it out Audible and it was a fairly in depth discussion on the many factors that answer your exact question so I thought I’d share. Here’s a good excerpt: https://crimereads.com/why-just-about-every-country-seems-to-have-a-favorite-scam/ https://crimereads.com/why-just-about-every-country-seems-to... The Canadian Paradox Some places in the world are what they call “low-trust societies.” The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid, and people, rightly, fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the “high-trust societies,” conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high. With that in mind, given what we know about the following two countries, why is it that the Canadian financial sector is so fraud-ridden that Joe Queenan, writing in Forbes magazine in 1985, nicknamed Vancouver the “Scam Capital of the World,” while shipowners in Greece will regularly do multimillion-dollar deals on a handshake? We might call this the “Canadian Paradox.” There are different kinds of dishonesty in the world. The most profitable kind is commercial fraud, and commercial fraud is parasitical on the overall health of the business sector on which it preys. It is much more difficult to be a fraudster in a society in which people do business only with relatives or where commerce is based on family networks going back for centuries. It is much easier to carry out a securities fraud in a market where dishonesty is the rare exception rather than the everyday rule. The existence of the Canadian Paradox suggests that there is a specifically economic dimension to a certain kind of crime of dishonesty. Trust—particularly between complete strangers, with no interactions besides relatively anonymous market transactions—is the basis of the modern industrial economy. And the story of the development of the modern economy is in large part the story of the invention and improvement of technologies and institutions for managing that trust. In other words, many things about the way the business world is organized make a lot more sense when you realize that they exist because of the constant drive for countries to become less like Greece and more like Canada.