Complex Numbers

Arsenic and Old Rice

Apologies for the Torygraph link today. If it helps, I'm going to rag on the article. Today in "You're doing it wrong!":

    How we are all cooking rice incorrectly - and could be endangering our health  

Millions of cooks are endangering their health by cooking their rice incorrectly, scientists believe.

Which scientists? The link provided with that lede goes to another Torygraph article scaremongering about lung cancer risk from high glycemic index carbohydrates, which violates at least two principles: 1) make your link relevant to the argument; 2) don't freakin' cite your own prior article as a source.

Putting more water in the pan or even steeping it overnight is the best way to flush out traces of the poison arsenic, they found.

Arsenic is well-known as a poison, but it's part of the natural environment (yet another reason I distrust "natural" claims).

I can't be arse(nic)d to go into much detail here, but it's an element on the periodic table, not some factory-produced compound.

The chemical contaminates rice as a result of industrial toxins and pesticides which can remain in the soil for decades.

It is true, however, that certain processes can concentrate and redistribute the element.

Experts have long debated what level of arsenic is safe, with new limits set by the EU in 2016.

"Safe" is misleading. The only thing I found on limits has to do with American public drinking water, where the limit is 10 parts per billion.   Usually. But that's for inorganic arsenic; organic arsenic (which, as that link points out, has nothing to do with the marketing concept known as "organic") is less toxic. Remember, it's an element, so it shows up in different kinds of molecules.

But experiments suggest that the way rice is cooked is key to reducing exposure to the toxic but naturally occurring chemical.

Or we could, I don't know... stop polluting everything?

Prof Andy Meharg, from Queens University Belfast, tested three ways of cooking rice for the BBC programme Trust Me, I’m a Doctor.

I'm way more inclined to trust the BBC than the Torygraph. Which doesn't mean they're perfect.

In the first, he used a ratio of two parts water to one part rice, where the water is “steamed out” during cooking.

In the second, with five parts water to one part rice, with the excess water washed off, levels of arsenic were almost halved.

And in the third method, where the rice was soaked overnight, levels of the toxin were reduced by 80 per cent.

That first one is the usual method, at least here in the US.

There's just one problem with the alternative methods. Well, perhaps more than one, but the one that jumped out at me was: that's a lot of water wasted. Which I guess isn't much of a problem if you're in the UK, where, I'm assured, it rains all the goddamned time. But in many parts of the world, water is precious (and becoming more so as time goes on).

This isn't usually much of an issue in what we've called "first-world" countries, but they get a different problem: insecure and sometimes questionable water supply. Which, as I've noted above, has a maximum arsenic level greater than 0.

Wells and other sources aren't formally tested at all.

To summarize, rice is a staple for more than half the world; rice has been found to have an unspecified but presumably risky level of arsenic; and using 2-3 times as much water, and possibly even more for rinsing after, might reduce arsenic levels... at the cost of time, water, and effort.

And once again, fixing the problem of industrial pollution falls squarely on our shoulders, rather than those of the companies who did the pollution in the first place.