Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/11/consumer-reports-warns-against-lunchables-due-to-high-sodium-lead-cadmium-and-toxins.html
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Next up!
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I’ve tried lunchables before. They’re…they’re not very good, to be honest. It’s a food that exists solely for the convenience factor. Maybe they should try taking out the lead, cadmium, and other toxins. I think they aren’t doing much for the flavor.
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I’d be curious about where the suspect compounds come from. Are they part of the ingredients or introduced during processing somehow? I doubt that they are deliberately added to the food. Each package has some kind of meat or cheese and a bread-stuff. Does one part have issues that the others don’t? The comments from CR are rather vague on how they did the testing and so on.
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@FoodScienceBabe on Instagram has an interesting discussion on this. Sounds like Consumer Reports was channelling the EWG a bit on this one.
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Lunchables lack texture - it’s food you can gum into your digestive system
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All the lead and cadmium a growing child needs!
“We meant to put the sodium in there!”
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I kinda think Lunchables have a unique taste that I kinda like. Is that the Cadiumum?
They seem very over priced for what they are, so I rarely get them.
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If we rebrand as “Lünchäbles” can we call the heavy metal a feature?
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Lead? Cadmium? They’re in dirt.
Most of the elements are naturally occurring. The better your analytic equipment, the better you’re able to find the vanishingly small amounts present in garden variety dirt. And dirt gets into food, because food is grown and produced in, near, and on dirt.
This is why we have Federal agencies with complex standards for these things in the first place–so someone with a clue can look at the ACTUAL NUMBERS and decide if they’re worth worrying about.
Outsorting this guardianship to a private organization with an axe to grind, selling fear of contamination, make for noisy press releases about stuff that could only be observed to have a measurable effect on health if we monitored ten billion people for a hundred years.
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It’s under the federal standard and around half of what is allowed in the most protective standard. The standards may be compromises, as they often are, but we are still talking about half.
They could probably replace the sodium with taste though.
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Yep. Hard to justify a big salary with a report that’s just Tim Russ:
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They stand by it, yes… but will they eat it and serve it to their own children.
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That’s not a useful question. If the answer is “No”, then OOH! HYPOCRITE!–but if it’s “Yes”, that could just mean they’re foolhardys like hundred-patent two-major-innovations killed-by-his-own-invention Thomas Midgley Jr… ( Thomas Midgley Jr. - Wikipedia. ). Who invented antiknock compound tetraethyl lead. From working with it, he was ill enough from lead poisoning in 1923 to stop working–but in 1924 was back and stunting at a press conference by pouring the stuff over his hands. (Then he went on to invent Freon. Then he caught polio and suffered partial paralysis. He rigged a pulley system to help get out of bed, became entangled in it, and strangled. Though the coroner ruled it a suicide.)
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Like John Selwyn Gummer?
1990: In an attempt to calm fears about “mad cow disease”, the agriculture minister, John Gummer, bought a £1.60 beefburger and fed it to his four-year-old daughter, after first eating one himself and declaring it “delicious”.
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Yet they shouldn’t go down your gullet.
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