My sister discussed this in one of her cooking classes. The subject came up and the chef wasn’t sure of the answer. I’ve looked all over the web (google, yahoo, etc) and can’t get any definite answer.
No - because heating it up doesn’t make lead go away. Lead is not a bacteria, it’s a metal. Heating it just makes it hot.
Duh. That makes perfect sense, alice_in_wonderland. I can’t believe I didn’t see that.
Alice has it right, with the exception that washing or boiling lead contaminated vegetables will remove lead from the liquid exposed surfaces. It ends up in the water.
Here’s an earlier thread on lead contamination of foodstuffs: Is there LEAD in my garlic plants?
Now let’s see how to make the lead go away!
What can we do to it? I guess we could set up a cell using Pb and another metal.
What acids dissolve lead? Sulfuric?
(of course, you wouldn’t want to eat the food afterwards…)
If you get the food hot enough it might melt and fall to the bottom, then when it cooled you could just pull the big lead disk out of the bottom of the food. Umm… umm… good!
Ready to eat that good, solid lead! :o
Well, it’s not * quite * as simple as that, as it’s remotely conceivable that heating lead in combination with other ingredients could create some stable lead compounds that are relatively non-toxic or that are not absorbed by the body. But it’s not the way to bet.
Everyone knows that the proper way to negate lead poisoning is to transmute the lead into gold. Sheesh, did everyone in this thread fail alchemy 101?
No, silly, you transmute oxygen-18 into gold. But then, of course, you’ve got to get rid of the gold, which means that you’re screwed unless you can lay eggs.
and in the real world, lead is going to either be in water (from lead-containing plumbing) in which case the answer is a good lead-removing water filter, or in paint chips and paint dust, in which case the answer is to just wash off the paint dust, or don’t put it in your food in the first place.
phew Glad no one else mentioned it… I forgot that we could do a single-displacement reaction and have the lead salt precipitate out! (and then do… what? Filter it off, I guess if we’re making soup or something. Or just ladle from the top :P)
Isn’t a law of physics that says something to the effect of “matter can be neither created nor destroyed”? Except by boiling in reallyreallyreally hot water.