Apparently the plant has an affinity for arsenic (the atevi might think it a nice trait)—and sucks it up where available. Now, the US set acceptable arsenic levels in drinking water. But—you take to raising rice on certain ground, and apparently it will do as rice does. Since there is no US standard for arsenic levels in food (does that seem rather a curious omission?) the possibility that certain locales, especially orchards converted to rice culture (arsenic was in certain pesticides acceptable on fruit)—can create a problem. We lived, in Oklahoma, near a town that had the acceptable level of arsenic in its water, due to its natural occurence in the soil. But…if you live there AND eat a lot of rice—you get the regulated amount in your water, and stack atop it the non-regulated amount in your food choice—
So…while I am not alarmist re warnngs about this and that, the rather gaping hole in foodstuffs regulation does argue that somebody, sooner or later, should conduct some tests.
The good news is, the longer rice is grown in a locale, the more it sucks out of the dirt, the poorer the dirt will become, so where rice has been grown for a long time, it should be quite safe. It seems rather like what we do in marine tanks, when you get a lot of hair algae—due to the phosphate that comes in on rock and sand; so you grow another sort of algae in an attached tank, and as it grows, and you tear up bits of it and toss it out (or give it to another hobbyist) away goes the phosphate, and with it the curse of hair algae. OR you can simply run the water through iron filings, and it binds the phosphate. I wonder what binds arsenic—and if it would be a similarly simple fix….
Meanwhile, we are watching the origin label, and going for old fields. If, that is, they haven’t put the rice paddy over something as bad, eh?
I say enjoy the dinner and if nobody drops over, it was good.
Yes, saw that in Consumer Reports. The California white Basmati that I prefer had one of the lowest levels of arsenic. But brown rice tended to have higher levels, and boo hiss, I’m trying to eat more of that (with its higher fiber content) to help lower my blood sugar. Dagnabbit.
Well, we went for a) Basmati ‘grown in the shadow of the Himalayas’, ie, probably Kashmir, product of India; and jasmine rice, product of Thailand, figuring they’d been at it a while. Japanese rice has high quality standards, but we don’t see that so much here except in specialty stores.
This lack of standards sounds like one of those little chasms between the Department of Agriculture and the FDA and the EPA—the latter being the agency that I believe sets water quality standards, the Ag department governing Agriculture in the growing phase; and the Food and Drug folk governing food PROCESSING, but not food growing. I’ve seen this kind of blind spot before, when Ag was left governing the use of glycol sprays in hotel room freshening because it is a ‘pesticide’, and the FDA and EPA had no authority to prevent people dispensing it in fogging pumps to clear out smoking rooms. (It is the source of the ‘convention sore throat’ and mysterious laryngitis that cursed several years of conventions.) When we set up these three agencies and divided their powers, only the EPA was born in the age of modern chemistry. The other two have turf defined in the age of Gilbert Chemistry Sets—you too, Bucky, can build a volcano.
CJ:
I have worked extensively in geo-engineering, in relation to hazardous waste remediation. One thing I can tell you is this: the EPA is not your friend. It hasn’t been for decades; it is not likely to be so tomorrow.
Stop looking to strong central government to solve your ills. It has only served to make them worse. We cannot afford this wishful thinking any longer.
I did not intend this as a political statement, but only as a practical one. Things aren’t working the way you think they should. Wake up a little, please?
I don’t care what party you support, if any. But we need to wake up and see reality. Neither of the two major parties have made anything better, in… how long?
And no, it’s not “the global situation” that is at fault. On the contrary: it is OUR government’s fault that the global situation is as bad as it is.
Vote the way you have in the past, and things will continue to get worse. Guaranteed. And I say that regardless of whether you voted Democrat or Republican.
My friends all call me alarmist, but when I consider all the health issues that we are seeing with kids and young adults these days, I feel I have to jump BACK on the soapbox…
Considering ALL the different chemicals we are exposed to daily it’s not any one chemical that is at fault, there’s no ‘smoking gun’ that you can point to and say ‘make THAT go away and everything will be butterflies and sunny skies from now on’. When your body is laboring under the accumulated weight of so many individual micro doses of toxins on a daily basis it is no wonder that eventually you WILL get sick – it just varies by individual depending on what your own immune system’s weakest point is.
You mean like BPA? 😉 One big thing you seem to be overlooking is “epigenetics”, how different exposures cause structural changes in our DNA, often by methylation. Perhaps this is the reason for increasing ADHD. I have Asperger’s, as did my father. OK, I inherited it from him, and there’s some thought ASD is a duplication on chromosome 7, but is it initially environmental?
I’m sure the story has been done already, but there’s a good SciFi yarn in a future time when certain remote, “pristine”, areas where life is lived in a “primitive” way (all natural foods, fibers, building materials, no synthetic chemicals, etc.), where children are raised into “couplehood”, have their children there in late teens and early 20’s, while their DNA is still “pristine, and then choose to stay, or leave their children with those that have stayed to go live in the contaminated modern world where nobody can have normal children. (Kind of a reverse variation of Herbert’s “Santaroga Barrier?)
I think I’ll add a rice cooker to my wish list, right after the cordless kettle. More energy efficient to heat water in the cordless kettle than the 1970’s Harvest Gold electric stove that comes with the duplex I live in. BTW, I am loving the Cuisinart bread machine I got on your recommendation. Makes great tasting bread even though the top tends to deflate. Any clues as to what might be causing that?
Also, any thoughts on the difference between general purpose flour and bread flour? Or whether self rising flour would work in a bread machine?
Self rising flour uses the chemical reaction that makes biscuits rise… NOT good for yeast bread!
Bread flour is higher in gluten, which gives the dough its elasticity and will hold the gases from the yeast better. Gluten also give a ‘chewier’ texture to the bread. General purpose flour will give you a softly textured, mediocre bread more like the stuff you get off the market shelves.
I stick to organic Indian Basmati rice, bought from a source which I know verifies that it’s genuinely organic – expensive but worth it.
Genetic modification is an even bigger problem, with serious health hazards – especially GM corn, because it’s so universally used.
As for weight gain in modern society, obese children, etc., understanding the cause is not rocket science.
Farmers feed a low level of antibiotics to animals because it makes them put on weight. It’s totally standard practice. It works for cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and almost any animal.
Now if people eat those animals… and if people are always being prescribed antibiotics for every minor little illness… they will gain weight too. It’s just common sense.
See this article, for example:
Can Antibiotics Make You Gain Weight?
http://www.alternet.org/food/can-antibiotics-make-you-gain-weight
That’s not to say that we should eliminate antibiotics – nobody wants to die young from some easily curable infection – but we should be very careful to use them only when really necessary. And think about getting them out of the food chain.
I have a somewhat stronger opinion of your last paragraph. Eliminate? For probably about half the ways they’re being used now. Using them only when necessary? Abso-bloomin’-lutely! Definitely get them out of the food chain. But even that isn’t enough to control them. Get the Physicians’ Desk Reference and see what fraction of them you’ll be peeing into the waste water, not removed in the treatment plant and going off downstream! 🙁 They’re another of those gifts that keep on giving.
My tap water has enough arsenic you can’t drink it! I accidentally killed one of 2 terrapins I was pet-sitting years ago by changing its water.
One can do what the Japanese do eat soy products such as tofu, natto and miso. Soy products chelate metals from your body. This may account for the lower mercury levels in many fishing towns that consume fish that are normally higher in mercury.
Yes, but as long as the soy products are fermented, and also not GM.
Traditional soy products are made from fermented soy. This is a slow process, and most modern western soy products are made with unfermented soy. There is a big difference.
See
http://www.naturalnews.com/025513_soy_food_soybeans.html
Well tofu is not fermented. The miso and natto I see in local stores are mainly imported from Japan. Also it is very easy for companies to test soy beans to see if they are GMO. The soy product brands I see in stores pretty much all say Non-GMO.
For a rice cooker, the one that gets general respect in Asia is Zojirushi, which is what I have. Dirt simple to use, has a meaningful ‘keep warm’ function, and has separate settings for white, brown, sushi, mixed, etc. I thought they were a total luxury until I owned one: they’re a necessity for anybody who uses a lot of rice. http://www.amazon.com/Zojirushi-NS-WAC10-Fuzzy-Logic-Uncooked-Cooker/dp/B0014JCY1E/ref=sr_1_8?s=kitchen&srs=2581471011&ie=UTF8&qid=1349537138&sr=1-8&keywords=rice+cooker
Easy to clean, too: but don’t use the dishwasher: the coating on the rice pan will respond far better to a gentle soap and water hand-wash. It has the bennie of a total break down: washable parts pop off, wipe clean, water measure is marked inside the cooking pot, the cord comes off, spoon and holder pop off, and everything goes into the interior bucket for storage inside the machine: machine has its own handle, slides into about a 15″x 10″ space in the shelves, and comes out and sets up inside a minute. If every appliance I owned were so easily and completely stored and deployed I’d be delighted. Has one other thing to keep track of: a simple green cup that is your rice measure. It also plays, with idiot cheerfulness, a selection of nursery songs. You can set the thing going when you get home from work, and forget it until you actually want to make dinner. I cook up a bunch at once, being lazy, store it in the fridge, and have rice for a week: it reheats really well.
It puts rice on our menu quite often, instead of when I have the patience to tend something on the stove from 20-40 minutes: Uncle Ben’s just doesn’t cut it with us.
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But back to our discussion: I’m sure our ancestors had their environmental problems—ranging from the discovery that poison ivy does not make good kindling or seasoning, to the problems of soot inhaled on a regular basis, and water sources that weren’t optimum, diseased food sources, spoilage, and pot washing conducted on streamside with a handful of sand hopefully upstream from where the animals water…we also live longer, thanks to cleanliness, modern medicine, and generally better nutrition…no winter starvation, munching increasingly iffy stores that were subject to ground seep, insect infestation (silverfish as winter protein—yum) and close confinement in shelter (one guy gets the seasonal crud and the whole family shares.) Not to mention overcutting of wood sources and slash and burn agriculture.
So every age has its problems, and we piled our current ones higher and deeper, building towns downstream from tailings-heaps, before the infant science of chemistry both showed us there is a problem, and the even younger science biochemistry began to show us that there is a way to use plants to uptake, move, and sequester a lot of contaminants. We’ve only very recently learned that one, and it can be real useful.
One problem is the determining and application of standards, because if you move in and set, say, an arsenic standard for rice, a number of small growers are going to get hurt—because their land has a problem, and maybe all their expensive equipment is set for that crop. That’s where local politics goes to Washington and pitches a fit about government interference, but in point of fact, you get your choice of whether to help out the local farmers by keeping the standards non-existent and letting the US population absorb more arsenic—which statistically, as a nation, we use infrequently—
But some individuals, especially on gluten-free diets, consume far more than the statistical average. So do you let the information out? Or do you keep it quiet? Do you organize a program to help the farmers decontaminate their land? That takes finance. Is it worth it? How bad is the damage?
Somewhere up there in DC there are people sweating those decisions, particularly as Consumer Reports is a lot more noise than the problem has made hitherto. There are also some rice growers who are probably not real happy with that article. And exporters who don’t want American rice to get a bad name…you could alleviate hunger in some areas of the world with more rice—but not if the locals think they’re going to be poisoned and die from a few bowls of the product. Irrationality multiplies when people feel set up, be it rice farmers or hungry folk in Africa, and the political opportunists take full advantage of it.
So probably we’ll hear more about the matter. Politics is an interesting balancing act, and there probably is already some sort of movement on the issue, for Consumer Reports to be able to get an article together…magazines that report on science and tech usually have a review process that first has to vet the info and then determine when and if it gets space in the magazine. It’s an interesting intersection of science and politics.
One of the best things I learned from my Chemistry degree was taught in the first week of Chem-1A. “Conservation of matter.” Sure, you can plant this or that to pull harmful elements out of the soil. Now you’ve got a bunch of plant material marginally enriched in this harmful element. What do you do with that? Nothing you can do will make that element disappear, vanish, gone forever.
Next best thing I learned in Physics-1B, the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. Stuff tends to dissipate, i.e. entropy, the state of disorder, increases. That stuff you didn’t want and dumped in tailings piles is going to get away, and it’s gonna cost you more to corral it again than it would have to deal with it properly from the get-go.
The problem isn’t the arsenic in the soil. It’s the arsenic in the fertilizer: http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/risk/studies/metals.html
There was also an article on BBC News a few days before the California rice scare. It was about a bunch of people in Sri Lanka who are dying of kidney failure: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19628295 because of pesticides and fertilizers.
So, yes, the FDA needs to set limits on toxic chemicals in our food. In the mean time, I’ll buy organic.
FDA? DDT is still being made in the US, for sale overseas. No prob? Winter produce from Mexico and Chile, et al! What are their laws?
The big point of all this is the very Buddhist observation that everything is interlinked and intimately related. Trying to deal with one bit at a time, the “divide and conquer” approach, only works in Calculus! 🙁
Sequestering may hold an element for later use—ie, if all the marine hobbyists mailed all their collected phosphate to a fertilizer factory, it would end up in veggies and flowers. OTOH, sequestering can mean cavern storage where you have no market for it. The earth holds all sorts of things we don’t want in our food supply. The problem is strongest where salt water gets to some of it, dissolves it, and carries it elsewhere.
I absolutely agree: the earth’s minerals may bond and make something else. But the bond can be broken and the components recovered.
Arsenic has other uses: ” Arsenic today is used in a lot of things besides poison. Arsenides can be found in paints, wallpapers, shotgun pellets, mirrors and semiconductors. One of the most interesting uses of arsonic is when it is added to gallium to make gallium arsen-ide. This produces light as a laser beam and is the light emitting diode that reads your compact discs.” [from http://library.thinkquest.org/C0113863/Arsenic.shtml%5D
So we all use it. Home decorators, hunters, divas, and computer geeks, grocery clerks and music fans are particular consumers…
And disposal of any of these items may ultimately break the chemical bonds and release it again into the groundwater.
I love chemistry. It’s so unexpected. From ancient assassins to a contaminant in rice to your CD player. Who’d have guessed?
Nice link. This caught my eye: “If ingested in small amounts over time, it will produce the symptoms of pneumonia and the victim will die with hardly a trace Of arsenic in his body.”
Reminds me of “Arsenic and Old Lace”, the classic movie with Alastair Sim.
As a child, I got into mysteries like Sherlock Holmes, and became fascinated by poisons…nowadays the books I checked out of the Lawton Carnegie Library would have had a squad car parked in our driveway. I knew the symptoms of all sorts of poisons, and went on into an interest in forensic medicine. On the other hand, I was also interested in astrophysics, geology, oceanography, and raising tadpoles.
To ponder: What if rice could be genetically engineered to not absorb excess amounts of arsenic, or conversely, if a plant could be GE to uptake excess arsenic and clean the soil? I’m not atevi, so less arsenic is probably better for me.
Well, here’s an example of such an effort. From India. Perhaps ‘in the shadow of the Himalayas.’ 🙂 http://phys.org/news64159534.html
In essence, they have some, but need it taken up into leaves, not stalled in the roots, in order to remove it efficiently. Seems to me that rice is doing a better job of ‘lifting’ it into the grassy part. So they could plant rice as a discard-plant, until frequent rice culture had cleaned the area. But—they don’t mention how many years or generations.
Some variety of algae would be good, because you can really compact, bale, and dispose of that in a more compact way than, say, grasses, which often uptake a stiffening mineral such as silica, that makes them bulky in disposal. Sending it straight to a processor that can extract the stuff for commercial use? Probably the process involves burying it somewhere else, in non-agricultural land.
*I say enjoy the dinner and if nobody drops over, it was good.*
This is clearly not Ilsidi’s line.
That’s where Thermodynamics bites ye. It’s virtually impossible to use natural means to get to a sufficient concentration, where it’s even cost effective to transport the stuff to someplace where it can be processed, and that’s to say nothing of the energy it would take to further process it.
ALways one of the hangups. Closest we can get to a free lunch is solar, wind, or maybe algae-to-methane, since they’re things the planet does/gets anyway and we usually just let it piffle away.
Just came through the Texas panhandle, and the roads and rail are alive with sections of big windmills, BTW, much of it near Childress—we watched several going up, and the big power line supports that are going to carry it. That is one thing the Texas panhandle has in plenty—wind. Lots of wind.
I watched a programme about the remote island of St Kilda which was fascinating on this. the soil that they grew their cereal crops on was full of lead and zinc due to the ancient practice of using bird (fulmer) carcases mixed with peat ash from the hearth rather than seaweed as normally practiced in coastal communities. (cliff nesting birds such as fulmer were a major part of their diet). and they didn’t do much in the way of crop rotation ….
poor old st kildans also suffered from neonatal tetanus which killed half the babies born in their first week in the mid 19th century, due to poor midwifery practices, just from tetanus bugs in the soil/sheep’s stomachs ……