Just another reason not to buy any food products from China.

[Dinner]

1) How is it a product of CA if it's imported from Thailand? I understand "Assembled" and such, but rice isn't exactly processed much.
2) Read the article. Thailand also has high levels of lead - _all_ of the samples had high levels, not just China or Taiwan.

Part of the problem is rice plants preferentially pick up some contaminants like arsenic, lead, radioactive waste, etc... In fact growing rice on contaminated soils (then burying the rice) is part of the environmental remediation plans for some sites including a location the US used to make nuclear bombs in Washington State. I'm not sure why the rice plant does that but it does.

[The Mad Monk]

How does that work? It's grown in California but then packaged in Thailand before being shipped back?

I think it's the other way around.

[Sava]

I'd heard that it was a crab farm.

Rampant deforestation has led to their extinction.

[DaShi]

My guess is they eat it themselves and the government knows there is a problem but doesn't want to get people upset so, like all other environmental health issues in China, the state just censors everything and prevents the truth from being officially recognized. Like how they call smog isn't smog and secretly is really just a yellow fog which covers all Chinese cities. The problem is rice requires lots of water and virtually all water in China is heavily polluted including with heavy metals like lead yet that polluted water is what is used to grow the rice. Then there are all the officially banned chemicals which are banned on paper but which can be bought in any store in China and which get used in tons of agriculture and food processing applications in China. Really, nothing in China is safe or at least you and I or even the regular Chinese can't tell what is contaminated and what isn't so the safest thing to do is just to avoid any food product from China. That's hard to do as 90% of the fish and shellfish the US imports now comes from China and almost no of it passes any safety or health checks when someone actually tests it.

Chinese inspections are a joke. It's a mix of laziness, incompetence, and corruption.

[Sava]

what's so funny about that?

[BlackCat]

Buy American products.

Bad idea :

White rice grown in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas, which account
for 34 percent of domestic rice, generally had higher levels of total arsenic and in
organic arsenic in our tests than rice samples from elsewhere

https://www.motherjones.com/files/finalarsenicembargo91912.pdf

[snoopy369]

More arsenic, less lead... Tradeoffs!

[Dinner]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/arsenic-rice-toxic-element-inside-grain_n_1900654.html

In the US south the arsenic levels mostly come from rice grown on old cotton farm land as many of the insecticides used on cotton are arsenic based.

[rah]

And that makes a difference how?

[Dinner]

It's why rice from those southern states has such high levels of arsenic in them. Like Blackcat said.

[rah]

My point was that our rice has it's own issues so we shouldn't be ragging on the quality of China's rice that harshly.

[Dinner]

That's why you should buy rice from California.

On another note I've pretty much stopped by tuna fish due to the mercury levels being so high, which sucks because I like tuna, however I have found that sardines make a nice substitute which has a similar flavor but no mercury (or at least extremely low levels) plus because sardines bred so fast they're a more sustainable option too. Get some high quality sardine boneless sardine fillets and use them just like you would on a tuna fish sandwich and you'll hardly notice the difference, will get more omega 3 fatty acids, no mercury, and you don't have to worry about driving a species to extinction with over fishing.

The one canned tuna I still buy is All American Tuna which is canned in San Diego from only whole chucks of local tuna fish and subspecies used tends to grow faster than the big ocean going tuna so there is only a fraction of the mercury in the tuna. The downside is since it's made in the USA it's about $5 per can instead of ~$1 per can for the cheap foreign stuff. On the upside though it really is one whole piece of tuna in the can where as the cheap stuff is mostly just a pureed mush of half tuna and half water.

[regexcellent]

e: didn't read thread

[BlackCat]

More arsenic, less lead... Tradeoffs!

"The hanging wasn't that bad, but the beheading - ouch, that was really a pain in the neck"

[DaShi]

what's so funny about that?

It's like an old Chinese joke.