Wanna feel your jaw drop to the floor? Check out this label that came in the wrapping of two pair of cooking tongs purchased at Target:
Got that? In case any of us is vision-impaired, let’s try that again, bf/cc/clc:
WARNING: Handling of the plastic used in this product may expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after use.
Now you’ve got it, right? We’re talking about cooking tongs, the gadgets you use to flip chicken in the frying pan, to flip steak on the barbecue, to toss salad at the table. The only plastic on the things is a coating smeared all over the handles.
Even though this little caveat is in plain sight, I didn’t notice it while I was inside the Target store shopping for old-fashioned hinged tongs. It’s tucked away on the back side of the packaging, and of course one is careful to display the merchandise with the front of the packaging showing. I just grabbed it off the rack and ran. The “plastic” mentioned here is a kind of tacky surface, white on one pair and black on the other, applied to the handles of these tongs, presumably to make it easier to manipulate them. The old tongs we used to get in the grocery store had no plastic goop on them — they were just plain stainless steel. They worked just fine. No one needed or asked to have the handles dipped in a vat of lead-laced plastic. But apparently if it ain’t broke, we have to fix it.
Now I’ll have to take these things back. Like I had nothing to do but traipse to Target. Over and over and over again…
It’s beginning to look a lot like they don’t make plain boring scissors-style stainless tongs anymore. They all have some degree of coating on them, though to what extent its nature may be poisonous is unknown — at least, so it goes at Amazon. That means eventually I’ll be reduced to having to get used to the now ubiquitous tweezer-type tongs, which I hate but which at least can still be had sans stupid coatings. Aggravating.
Can you imagine? A freaking cooking utensil, coated with a toxic substance. In an American store that one would presume would come up to American safety standards. Get used to it, indeed: in the brave new world of globalization, if the Chinese, denizens of one of the most polluted countries on earth, will put up with it, you get to put up with it.
Another aggravation: English Lemon Oil for furniture has disappeared from the market. The only oil-type rub-0n furniture polishes still available are Old English and, in a very few places, Weiman’s. Old English lemon oil, my preference, is still available at Amazon, for 16-ounce prices ranging from $3.49 to $8.47. This once commonplace item no longer appears on retailers’ shelves. Period. I’ve been to Target, Safeway, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walgreen’s, and Ace. Lo! no more Old English lemon oil, screw you very much. So now, having wasted a great deal of gas in the search, I’ll have to dork around with ordering it online.
Ridiculouser and ridiculouser.
Un-freaking-believable. What has it all come to? (I don’t know when I last saw plain metal tongs anywhere, either)
Zillions of plain metal tongs at thrift stores.
Yeah, I had exactly the same thought. SDXB always shops the thrift stores for his kitchen gadgets — and they carry old stuff that’s still perfectly good…stuff presumably replaced with NEW! IMPROVED! LEAD-ENHANCED products from China!!!!
Hmmm…lead poisoning warning on cooking utensils…super. Living in a state with perhaps the strictest lead based paint laws in the Country….this would be humorous if it wasn’t so sad. Just a thought, DW just had a pair of tongs you describe break and I offered to fix them. She came home from Wal-Mart with TWO tongs on a card for ….88 cents….both indentical to the one that broke…crazy. And I share your loyalty for Weimans lemon oil product. My local grocer still carries this….I hope what you describe isn’t a glimpse into our future in this neck of the woods…
The two tongs on a card: that’s what I bought. Did she read the squib on the back of the card?
I’m just going to buy the lemon oil from Amazon. There’s a point where the cost of shipping is a wash with the cost of driving your tank all over town.
We have an awesome pair of hand made wooden tongs that are so beautiful I’m afraid to use them with anything other than dry salad! I don’t want to ruin them.
Why such angst over California’s packaging scare tactics?
The presence of lead is a scare tactic? How so?
I actually agree with the labeling overkill–at least for you. Like me, you are not going to have any more kids. And also like me, you are far more likely to have been exposed to lead in your childhood and youth. Mr FS had a pretty high level. It’s from the lead based paint that no one was worried about back then,
I doubt there’s much lead on the handles of a tong.
LOL! Yeah, there’s a lot of silliness going on.
Still, it’s got to be possible to manufacture a pair of ordinary metal tongs without coating them in plastic that contains any amount of lead. We know that a) the coating isn’t necessary, and b) there probably are lead-free coatings, if the manufacturer is dead set on selling us something else we don’t need.
The facts that I’m an old lady and so less likely to be harmed by lead exposure and there are no kids around the house doesn’t change the fact that many people who buy these things do have children. Besides, my son could, in theory, still produce the occasional grandchild.
There’s no safe threshold for lead exposure: no known amount of lead is too small to harm you. Advancing age is thought to be a factor that makes you more vulnerable to lead toxicity. In adults, chronic symptoms include abdominal pain, sleep problems, headaches, short-term memory problems, depression, and a variety of other issues. Any of those sound familiar? 😉
Here’s an article on the topic that seems reasonably sane: http://nyti.ms/101TMhz
I guess the question that I’m not sure is whether this is a new warning or a new practice.
It’s interesting to see this but when I think back to stories about houses 50-75 years ago, they’d paint every wall and ceiling with lead paint. Granted, you weren’t cooking with your walls like you do with tongs (though you always heard about kids ‘eating paint chips’ which is something that I nor any other kid I knew ever did growing up), so I guess the question is does this really expose us to any more lead than we did in the past, or are we still ‘better off’ than where we were decades before?
I’d put my money on “a new practice.” But then so is coating the handles of kitchen tongs with plastic.
A problem with lead paint is that it imperceptibly flakes off as dust, so the ordinary house dust is full of lead. Little kids crawl around on the floor and stick their hands in their mouths, thereby ingesting lead. And some children, like some puppies, do chew on things like the sides of the crib and even the windowsill. In low SES households, children may suffer from nutritional deficiencies and so develop pica, a craving for weird things like plaster. In the older buildings that poor folks tend to inhabit, this would be a fair way to consume a hefty dose of lead.
Lead is ubiquitous. It’s in the soil on properties anywhere near highways or main drags where cars used to run on leaded gas…so if you live in the city, those veggies growing in the backyard may not be as organic as you think.
It IS ridiculouser! There’s a lot of handy little things I remember from being a kid, but they dont’ sell anymore. Instead they sell more expensive alternatives that don’t do as good a job and are more toxic. It makes no sense!!